Comment by customguy
1 day ago
"the sand doesn't matter, only the beach does"? Makes no sense.
Perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away.
> In 100 years people will look at our ephemeral artifacts as silly little things
Whereas they'll totally admire the hamster wheels in which people shoveled product? Well, I don't care either way. Craftsmanship and care have their own rewards, and shape the person engaging in them for the better.
>Perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away.
But using the DNA example- perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of good. Our bodies are far from perfect but they’re functional and effective. If the biological imperative was perfect genomes and not functional genomes, there would be no life at all.
I’m not a developer, I’m a consumer of digital products. I couldn’t care less, or even have the ability to notice, if code is perfect. I’m here to achieve a goal through software. If it achieves that goal, what is the problem from my end?
We revisit our ideas about stuff we didn't know existed ~100 years ago so often now, I don't attach any value to calling things we don't understand junk.
When we call out bloat in software, it's not because we don't know what the code is doing, but the opposite, because we know it better than the author. To compare that to life is kinda as far off the mark as possible.
> perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of good.
No, but when good gets drunk on sheer money and wants to take even the idea of perfection, of craftsmanship, of correctness and care out back, then maybe "perfection" should clap back every now and then.
> If the biological imperative was perfect genomes and not functional genomes, there would be no life at all.
It's not an imperative, it's a fact. The laws of physics are kinda strict that way, a puddle always settles at the lowest point. It doesn't settle at some "good enough" point. From what we know so far that never happens, even once, in this gigantic universe across these unfathomable timespans.
Why aren't you simply copy pasting your comment and repeating everything 5 times instead of saying it once? We all live by this, to some degree, we all know this intuitively to be true. We can be wasteful on purpose, out of whimsy or depression or whatever, but we're never confused about whether it's better to drink from a glass, where 300ml water in the glass mean 300ml water in the stomach, or drinking from a sieve, which means 99% of the water just goes to waste.
The fact that such simple things are even discussed to me prove the presence of "bad" factors. Of coercion, greed, fear, confusion, whatever, you name it. It gives me ants on top of a grass blade waiting for a cow because a fungus told it to vibes, when it comes to the "industry".
> I’m not a developer, I’m a consumer of digital products. I couldn’t care less, or even have the ability to notice, if code is perfect. I’m here to achieve a goal through software. If it achieves that goal, what is the problem from my end?
None IMO, because you're unlikely to shove your thing into everybody's life, or telling people to just give up and give in because it's all the same etc. At worst you'd be wasting your own electricity or holding your own data hostage.
> Perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away.
Perfection in glue and plumbing?
That's what 99% of software is. Even active-active distributed systems are glue and exist only to bridge ephemeral infrastructure. Everything will eventually be thrown out and rewritten.
Nobody lauds the half-century old banking code written in COBOL. They want it ripped out and replaced.
Nothing is "perfect". Not even close.
> "the sand doesn't matter, only the beach does"? Makes no sense.
The code isn't the sand, it's the sandcastle.
> > In 100 years people will look at our ephemeral artifacts as silly little things
> Whereas they'll totally admire the hamster wheels in which people shoveled product?
They'll hear about "You Tube" and "Face Book", I'm sure. But none of the code that runs either of those things will likely be running or capable of running.
> That's what 99% of software is. Even active-active distributed systems are glue and exist only to bridge ephemeral infrastructure. Everything will eventually be thrown out and rewritten.
> Nobody lauds the half-century old banking code written in COBOL. They want it ripped out and replaced.
So? That's true for actual plumbing, too. That changes nothing about the fundamental fact that a pipe that achieves a specific thing with N gram of materials and N meters of pipe length is better than something that is 100x times heavier and goes around the block several times just because why not.
> The code isn't the sand, it's the sandcastle.
Same difference. It makes just as little sense to say "the sand the sandcastle is made of doesn't matter, only the sandcastle does."
> But none of the code that runs either of those things will likely be running or capable of running.
Obviously. Who claimed otherwise?