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Comment by jodrellblank

9 hours ago

I'm glad the last FizzBuzz-golfed-in-$esolang I put on the internet was "obviously a good for the public", although I wouldn't mind seeing your reasoning because it isn't clear to me how.

3 comments

jodrellblank

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p-e-w  8 hours ago

Demonstrating how it’s possible to do something is a public good. This really isn’t complicated unless you’re being deliberately obtuse.

  • jodrellblank  3 hours ago

    > "This really isn’t complicated unless you’re being deliberately obtuse."

    Some open source software has changed the world, for the better. By quantity, most open source repositories are forks of another with no changes, new projects abandoned before getting anywhere, abandonware that an author has moved on from, or that the world has moved on from. They're no more than digital litter. If they were real world artifacts, they would be disposed of as trash, or sold to asset strippers, or nature would rot them away eventually. In the digital world we have built a hoarder's paradise and that has costs - costs to read through them, sort through them, decide if they are worth bothering with. Costs of leaving outdated, misleading, insecure, unreliable, code hanging around for people (and LLMs) to 'learn' from in negative ways.

    It's probably good that any developer or hobbyist can build their own blog engine. It's not "obviously" good that the public benefits from 5,000 partial blog engines, let alone 50,000 of them, or in a hundred years 5,000,000 of them; one doesn't have to be deliberately obtuse to question that.