Comment by whilenot-dev
2 years ago
I don't quite get how your second paragraph relates to the first one, could you please elaborate?
I honestly would consider myself a "fanatic of simplicity and dumb code", but for the simple reason that source code should stay easy to hack at all times. I want to enable "this kind of spontaneous, incremental technical improvements", and also want these hacks to pass code review (just add a "// HACK:" comment).
But in regard to kernel development I probably underestimate the inherent complexity of 1B+ SLOC bases.
At the time I worked at scrum shop, which was great at preventing some kinds of stupid waste of time, and IMO likely better overall than most of the anti-scrum brigade on HN. It was also free of inspired work. Most inspired work is crap. Someone's pet feature isn't customers' favourite feature… but scrum kills all of them, and that's too much.
That company later set up hackathons: A time-boxed escape from scrum, you can write whatever you want, and if the team likes the look of the hacky prototype afterwards it's adopted. Some things don't sound good before you write code, or some programmers can't tell the right story before writing code, not sure what, it doesn't matter anyway.