A get of my lawn section :)

I remember when GUIs started becoming a thing, I dreaded the move from Text to GUIs due to complexity. I also remember most programs I wrote when I started on minis were 64k code and 64k text. They were rather powerful even by today's standards, they did one thing and people had to learn which one to use to perform a task.

Now we have all in one where in some cases you need to page through endless menus or buttons to find an obscure function. In some cases you just give up looking and move on. Progress I guess.

The services usually persisted except for automatic updates so I only had to restart all the services a few times per week so it didn't make sense to invest time to automate.

Now, with systems like npm, maven or cargo, all you need to do to get a package is to add a line in a configuration file, and it fetches all the dependencies you need automatically from a central repository. Very convenient, however, you can quickly find yourself with 100+ packages from who knows where and 100s of MB of code.

In C, traditionally, every library you include requires some consideration. There is no auto-download, and the library the user has may be a different version from the one you worked with, and you have to accommodate it, and so does the library publisher. Or you may have to ship is with your own code. Anyways, it is so messy that the simplest solution is often not to use a library at all and write the thing yourself, or even better, realize that you don't need the feature you would have used that library for.

Bad reason, and reinventing the wheel comes with its own set of problems, but at least, the resulting code is of a manageable size.

A 2024 plea for lean software - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39315585 - Feb 2024 (240 comments)

I am at a big tech company and have seen some wildly insecure code make it into the codebase. I will forever maintain that we should consider checking if candidates actually understand software engineering rather than spending 4 or 5 hours seeing if they can solve brainteasers.

Want a simple web server ? Well, you’re going to get something with a JSON parser, PAM authentication, SSL, QUIC, websockets, an async framework, database for https auth, etc.

Ever look at “curl”? The number protocols is dizzing — one could easily think that HTTP is only a minor feature.

At the distro level, it is ridiculous that so long after Alpine Linux, the chasm between them and Debian/RHEL remains. A minimal Linux install shouldn’t be 1GB…

We used to boot Linux from a 1.44mb floppy disk. A modern Grub installation would require a sizable stack of floppies! (Grub and Windows 3.0 are similar in size!)