Some day, in the distant future, 2015, development of all new startup projects' descriptions, documentation, websites and source code will be automated using Markov chains. The projects' half-life will be a strong function of its position on the Hacker News Front Page. After dropping out of the top 30, the project immediately decays into an EOL abandoned repo in an archive no one will ever look at.
The conspiracy, what most people know is true yet are afraid to admit, is that the Markov chains are trained entirely on past failed code projects. Like cows chewing their own cud, like dogs lapping up their own vomit. Soylent Green is People and Libraries are Pure Virtual.
____ is set of ____ micro frameworks, tools and utilities, under ____ MB. Designed with common sense to make things simple, but not simpler. Get things done! Build your Beautiful Ideas! Kickstart your Startup! And enjoy the _____.
is this the future of technology, or has the future already arrived
I have some free time today (kids stayed over at Grandma & Grandpa's last night, and wife is at an event all day), so I decided to have some fun, running with your idea to create a Twitter bot that generates “Show HN”-style headlines:
A shame that you didn't decided to make this very insightful comment on one of the "Library ___ in [Rust|Go]" threads. I'm not trying to bag on anyone, just want us to maybe consider that there is some sort of "underlying" malaise that is causing us to invent, and reinvent constantly. Is it due to us simply wanting to reinvent things, or perhaps due to libraries/frameworks eventually becoming too big that we need to reinvent it in smaller forms and new languages? I don't know, but it needs to be discussed...
People are building those things in Go and Rust because they're currently implemented in unsafe languages like C/C++ and are therefore riddled with undiscovered memory management bugs, overflow bugs, undefined behavior etc, which are often security vulnerabilities waiting to be exploited. I don't think it's reinvention for reinvention's sake, I think they're genuinely trying to fix some of the horrible historical mistakes of C.
"Is it due to us simply wanting to reinvent things"
After observing myself and a couple of developer friends over the last few years, i can most definitely say yes. We are addicted to building our own things, creating layers after layers of abstraction, frameworks, tools, because it makes us feel like we're creating something.
What saves some of us, is to have a greater satisfaction seing someone else actually use our things, than creating that thing. And so the goal becomes more "what do people need" rather than "what would i have fun building today".
To be fair, the Java ecosystem is quite mature, whereas Go and Rust are relatively young languages, and we still need people to develop all the amenities of modern programming for those languages. Yet Another Java(Script) Framework is more deserving of that sort of comment than The First Couple of Rust|Go Frameworks of Their Kind are.
I think I can attach another insight into this. The underlying malaise is probably related to the human condition. Humans are fundamentally a medium for our collaborative works (in this context) and two factors causes these rebuilds.
1. A need to cut your teeth on a solved problem when diving in to a new category of thinking.
2. The high cost of transferring a model of thinking between two humans, especially over a vast amount of time. I think 3 years is vast compared to maybe 100 work hours to model and implement the core of a problem.
The conspiracy, what most people know is true yet are afraid to admit, is that the Markov chains are trained entirely on past failed code projects. Like cows chewing their own cud, like dogs lapping up their own vomit. Soylent Green is People and Libraries are Pure Virtual.
____ is set of ____ micro frameworks, tools and utilities, under ____ MB. Designed with common sense to make things simple, but not simpler. Get things done! Build your Beautiful Ideas! Kickstart your Startup! And enjoy the _____.
is this the future of technology, or has the future already arrived