Post #209807
2026-02-01 13:37 UTC
Replies (12)
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@philcowans@universeodon.com 2026-02-01 18:51
@suetanvil@freeradical.zone - and then in practical terms, to do anything at all, you need a system (in the form of a web browser) so complex that it can only be produced by a handful of huge corporations.
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@resuna@ohai.social 2026-02-01 20:18
@suetanvil@freeradical.zone > The original web is just a hacked SMTP server sending SGML files. Actually, it's an enhanced version of 'finger' protocol. SMTP is much more complex. The fact that the web is literally an extended finger explains so much.
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@raktheundead@vmst.io 2026-02-02 14:59
@suetanvil@freeradical.zone: "It seems that perfection is not obtained when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove" - Antoine de Saint-Éxupery
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@suetanvil@freeradical.zone 2026-02-01 13:38
(Larry Wall is the exception that proves the rule.)
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@athas@freeradical.zone 2026-02-01 16:41
@suetanvil@freeradical.zone A lot of those examples were all about refusing to solve the difficult problem and realising you could get away with it, however. Forth and Unix in particular. Even today, Forth tends towards radical iconoclasm.
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@MissConstrue@mefi.social 2026-02-01 18:09
@suetanvil@freeradical.zone My niece was trying to figure out how to do a thing, and I said something like, at the command line, do X, and she said what’s a command line, and I turned to my sister and said “you have brought shame upon this house”. (And now my niece has a Linux box, and she is killing it on scripting.) (Not claiming genius, I might recognize it as it swooshes past like a deadline, but that’s it.)
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@EricLawton@kolektiva.social 2026-02-01 18:21
@suetanvil@freeradical.zone "Big budgets and too little time" and no ethics or empathy.
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@fivetonsflax@tilde.zone 2026-02-01 18:54
@suetanvil@freeradical.zone @bsdphk@fosstodon.org looking at Kubernetes like 👀
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@StompyRobot@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-02-01 19:18
@suetanvil@freeradical.zone I like the sentiment, but in practice, systems become complex because real humans demand complex behaviors. The delightful simplicity in lisp and forth works when the problems you solve are delightfully simple and can all be kept in your head at once. Yes, there are also people who add needless complexity, and that should all be removed, but the fundamental world is super complex and over simplifying only leads to a poor fit to real requirements.
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@kauzerei@social.tchncs.de 2026-02-01 20:28
@suetanvil@freeradical.zone as a proud #OpenSCAD user, I find it funny, when big commercial CAD software makes such a big deal out of their new revolutionary parametric design capabilities
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@vt52@ioc.exchange 2026-02-01 20:44
@suetanvil@freeradical.zone all of the gains from Moore's Law _should_ have accrued to the software user, but instead was stolen by corporations to spend on software stack abstractions want to render a paragraph of text on a webpage? load this 20MB JS bundle
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@tekhedd@byteheaven.net 2026-02-02 17:49
@suetanvil@freeradical.zone IPv4 comes to mind.