[http://tinyclouds.org/rant.html]

(by Ryan Dahl)


October 2011

I hate almost all software.

It's unnecessary and complicated at almost every layer. At best I can
congratulate someone for quickly and simply solving a problem on top
of the shit that they are given. The only software that I like is one
that I can easily understand and solves my problems. The amount of
complexity I'm willing to tolerate is proportional to the size of the
problem being solved.

In the past year I think I have finally come to understand the ideals of
Unix: file descriptors and processes orchestrated with C. It's a beautiful
idea. This is not however what we interact with. The complexity was not
contained. Instead I deal with DBus and /usr/lib and Boost and ioctls
and SMF and signals and volatile variables and prototypal inheritance
and _C99_FEATURES_ and dpkg and autoconf.

Those of us who build on top of these systems are adding to the
complexity. Not only do you have to understand $LD_LIBRARY_PATH to
make your system work but now you have to understand $NODE_PATH too -
there's my little addition to the complexity you must now know! The
users - the one who just want to see a webpage - don't care. They don't
care how we organize /usr, they don't care about zombie processes,
they don't care about bash tab completion, they don't care if zlib is
dynamically linked or statically linked to Node. There will come a point
where the accumulated complexity of our existing systems is greater than
the complexity of creating a new one. When that happens all of this shit
will be trashed. We can flush boost and glib and autoconf down the toilet
and never think of them again.

Those of you who still find it enjoyable to learn the details of, say,
a programming language - being able to happily recite off if NaN equals
or does not equal null - you just don't yet understand how utterly fucked
the whole thing is. If you think it would be cute to align all of the
equals signs in your code, if you spend time configuring your window
manager or editor, if put unicode check marks in your test runner, if you
add unnecessary hierarchies in your code directories, if you are doing
anything beyond just solving the problem - you don't understand how fucked
the whole thing is. No one gives a fuck about the glib object model.

The only thing that matters in software is the experience of the user.