mekoka
Is it? How long do you expect to keep your momentum after "taking over the market"?
Anecdata time. I once joined a 3 year old project that had ground itself to a near halt with this philosophy. The project's lead seemed almost allergic to the word "refactoring". It had accrued so much tech debt that I was the third "new guy" to join in less than two years, after the previous attempts to hire had successively faltered within 6 months, because my predecessors couldn't deal with the unmaintainable mess. I made it to 9 months.
Maintainability is not tied to OOP or functional, but rather to how much a team cares to manage the cognitive load that comes attached to having to deal with the code base. When that becomes a genuine priority, the code tends to be written with concern for the next human mind's ability to interact with it. And when it makes sense in that one pursuit, functional, OOP, DRY, WET all become valid -- even seductive but toxic affordances like inheritance can sometimes be useful in the right context.
I'd be prudent to use a clear faux-pas by a BDFL as an argument to push for an alternative, seemingly more consensual, leadership style. I'd also be careful to fall for the apparent lack of overt aggression in the latter type of structures, as a necessarily positive signal. I've seen people in various such communities (including the two cited languages) that have chosen not to interact with their steering committees, because of perceived toxicity.
This can and does happen with any kind of structure and can take many shapes, some of whom are too subtle or passive to even accurately pinpoint, in the way you would for example directly index a BDFL. In The Tyranny of Structurelessness Jo Freeman made the case that the lack of a clear structure in the make up of a movement presents with opportunities for very fuzzy power dynamics and related abuses that are also much more challenging to deal with.
Making software projects successful has always been about a lot more than just writing code. People have been "rewriting code from scratch" successfully even before LLMs. We just don't tend to call it that. We call it "cloning", "competition", "copy", "alternative-to", "reverse-engineering", "x-written-in-language-y", etc.
It’s more important to learn how computers work and make the language just a means to understanding how they work. [...] even in this age of higher level abstractions and web development, it’s still important to understand the basics of CPU scheduling, memory, cache hierarchies, file systems, disc and file access. When you work directly above the syscall layer, whether in C, Zig or Rust, it really helps you understand what’s happening[...]
> On the same note, why do game devs need to give Steam 30% of their money and not just sell to the public directly and pocket the 30%?
We're needlessly making this into a general problem. Why hastily discuss ideal models? The current model is fine and the issue isn't generalized. We're talking about having the option to skip asshole middlemen, or to be more specific, Amazon. A company so big that solving this special case on its own leaps us a huge portion of the way into solving the problem at large.
Is the general sentiment that Steam is also an asshole?
Similarly, designing your schema to match the domain does not necessarily grant you the productivity boons of an ORM.
Having (ab)used Postgres with and without ORM, I've never had a situation where the latter imposed any kind of design decisions on the schema. They're orthogonal concerns. Itself, the choice of using an ORM tends to be motivated by experience with certain requirements in the business logic. I love SQL, but when having to deal with API resources and their various representations, marshaling, validation, options, etc, it's difficult -- and to say the least, impractical -- to stay principled to the "no-ORM" and "raw-SQL" mottos.
Not really. ORMs (memory) and databases (disk) are distant by multiple orders of magnitude performance wise. Skipping the ORM to shave off some cycles is akin to haggling over a few pennies on your thousand dollars bill.
For context
Can we PUHLEASE stop this AI Confidence Theater, people? It’s doing more harm than good.
What does that even mean? Not everything published has to be with the purpose of entertaining. This is a more recent mindset that came with the advent of the "Content Creator" (think Mr.Beast). But it needs not be this engineered. Historically, some of the more interesting channels on YouTube have been people organically sharing something that was genuinely dear to them. Offered with little concern as to whether it's "what people want to watch". They make you want to watch it, because it's a passion that they manage to convey. By contrast, people who are particularly concerned about eyeballs seem to publish with the purpose of meeting the audience's interest as a main guiding factor. And yes, maybe for those, YouTube is a better fit. But I also know many for whom moving to a reliable alternative (tech wise) would be a step up.
If for instance your goal is to share educational content for free, provided that the hosting platform is sound, your main concern as far as your audience finding your content should be that of discoverability. Which is an easy enough kink to iron with current search technology.
First, the organization must have an original steering body made up of "true believers" in a shared mission and vision. This body must make preventing the short or long term erosion or dilution of its mission a priority. Meaning that there's awareness that this particular corruption is a possibility from the start. Also, an understanding of the typical mechanisms through which it can happen (usually very human).
Second, as part of its survival strategy the steering body has the responsibility to identify other genuine true believers and integrate them in its makeup. There must be built-in assumptions that many outsiders will be attracted to its powers of influence and will try to infiltrate it.
Joining the steering council should thus be done primarily based on "culture fit". Admittedly a rather segregating practice, but one which in this case comes with the advantage that certain signals are just hard to fake on the long run. So, although many could try to dress, look, talk, or walk the part for a while, there will always be some shibboleth that trips up impostors.
I foresaw some problems to this structure that I haven't yet worked out, but it feels like a step in the right direction, if I had to come up with a solution.
I once made a travel friend who just didn't get the point of me taking eight hours to slow travel by train or by bus across a country that we were both visiting, when she could just hop on a plane and get to the next city in an hour. Earlier in my youth, transportation choices were economically motivated, but what I got from it would influence all future visits to other countries. When chilling with other travelers, exchanging tips and stories, it was as if my friend was visiting a completely different place. She left the country shortly after, confiding to me in the end that she really didn't see what the big deal was with it and that she would probably never be back.
I understand that some people may not resonate with this outlook -- and maybe it's just me getting older -- but I've grown to see that there's indeed such a thing as going through life in a hurry. I do think that the jury's still out as to the overall impact of AI on what I would label "useful friction".
I can see how that could be useful in contexts where the work is about mulling over concepts, trying to uncover some hidden patterns. Philosophy, sociology, psychology come to mind. But looking at my large cache of notes on well known technology, I have a hard time seeing where the value would be.
I think it's worth pointing out because ZK pops up quite often on HN, as if it's the pinnacle of note taking. In reality, a lot of people here may just be wasting much of their time.