Re:Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News
by harel on Monday September 02, 2019 @07:20AM
(#20858375)
Very possible. Also possible there was a valid reason at the time, and even though it's no longer valid nobody bothered to look into it. All I'm saying is that "created" things exist/happen for a reason, which is not always obvious to a 3rd party. I've had this happen with my own code. I find some old code that looks really dumb, no idea why I wrote it like that. I then spend time to refactor it properly, only to hit some obscure edge case which ultimately leads me back to the 'dumb code'
People seem to assume every aspect of this forum has some brilliant, purposefully elegant rationale behind it, but the truth is PG designed the language (and the forum) to be experimented with and iterated upon, and likely didn't intend the forum to be considered "finished." This software isn't a masters' thesis, it's a proof of concept for a web application in Arc lisp.
Unfortunately, a cargo cult mentality has kind of grown up around this forum and every aspect of it is treated as sacred and not to be touched because "there must be a reason for it." The reason is probably that PG didn't care enough to iterate on the first working solution he came up with.