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
- Avatar
- The new Star Wars films
Software is shit
and I love it.Some quotes that we should keep in mind:
First, solve the problem, Then, write the code.
John JohnsonOne Page Principle: A specification that will not fit on one page of 8.5x11 inch paper cannot be understood.
Mark ArdisWe dont ship features, we ship feature maintaince.
meA far from complete list of harmful software and related tooling ...
| Harmful | Less harmful alternatives |
|---|---|
| SGML, XML, YAML. | JSON, CSV, plain(UTF-8) text. |
| Package managaers (apt, pacman, brew, winget, ...). | Nix. |
| FSH. | Nix. |
| Docker. | Nix. |
| GNU autoconf/automake, CMake, imake, scons, waf. | Plain old portable makefiles. |
| Microsoft Windows | Just get 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
Words have clear meaning, however this can be lost due to differences in culture, language, understanding, context and the the passing of time. This destorys communication and causes conflict.
Examples:
- Capitalism
- Communism
- Truth
- Fair
- ...
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GitHub:dominicegginton Stack Overflow: dominic-egginton Linkedin: dominic-egginton From:Midlands UK