~/ ~/documents ~/harmful.txt github

Things Considered Harmful

The world is full of things that most people think are OK or even good, when in reality are either evil or plain stupid.

Films

Software is shit

and I love it.

Some quotes that we should keep in mind:

A far from complete list of harmful software and related tooling ...

Harmful Less harmful alternatives
SGML, XML, YAML JSON, CSV, plain(UTF-8) text
Package managers (apt, pacman, brew, winget, ...) Nix
FSH Nix
Docker Nix
GNU autoconf/automake, CMake, imake, scons, waf Plain old portable makefiles
Microsoft Windows A Linux or BSD based operating system
Subversion, aka svn Git, or even plain old tarballs would be better than svn
GPL, LGPL, Apache Software License, MPL, CC ISC, MIT/X, BSD, CC0, public domain

I don't provide a rational for the above, and I leave it as an exercise for the reader to research and understand why the above are categorised as harmful and what the alternatives are.

Hint: complexity, maintainability, security, reproducibility, freedom, ...

Words

Freedom of speech and expression should always be sacrosanct, however, the words we use are often misunderstood, misused, misinterpreted and misrepresented.

Words mostly have clear meaning; however, this can be lost due to differences in culture, language, understanding, context and the passing of time. This destroys communication, causes conflict and therefore renders themselves useless.

Examples:

Get it?