Trainwreck Design

I have been wondering about this more recently.

I’ve filed bug fixes on a handful of projects and tracked open issues on quite a few, and the stream of inbound PRs is often so random. Not just bug fixes but new features. Where’s the plan? Whats the scope? Which of these PRs is likely to land? Can anyone but the maintainer guess?

Hm, yes, well. Trainwreck design seems to be another term for 'design by natural evolution', more or less the way the literate apes which are responsible for these systems came about themselves. Just like we are full of odd design choices [1] so are our creations. We learn to deal with them as long as they do not cause egregious problems, otherwise we build something else which more fits the bill at that moment. The moment passes, things change and before long the fancy new replacement for that old piece of junk is getting crusty itself but a drop of oil here and a well-aimed slap there keep it functional so why bother, there's more important stuff to do. Disparate components of the Rube Goldberg contraption age at different times, some are patched and some are replaced entirely but the machine keeps running while that other team with their visionary leader finds out that the well thought-out design does not lend itself for crossing that chasm which the recent earthquake produced. While they are waiting for the right design to percolate up through the masses we added the bridge tool to the toolbox and kept it there just in case - it is a big box. Lo and behold, it came in handy quite often, who knew that a bridge could be used to walk from tree to tree through the jungle? And so it grows and grows, every now and then shedding some parts while gaining new ones. That is how it came about, just like how we came about. That is fine by me as one who is part of the motley crew of tinkerers who make it happen. Every now and then someone comes along with a vision of taming this mess, to give it a new facade, to bring order to the chaos, seemingly oblivious of the many corroding and overgrown remnants of previous attempts at taming the beast we passed along the way. I say let them try to tame it, maybe someone succeeds in breeding some nice and docile pet out of it some day which obeys your every command - only to find out it has lost the ability to fend for itself in times of trouble. Poor thing, another one bites the dust while the beast just keeps going and going, warts and all. In the end it is said only the cockroaches and tardigrades survive but rest assured, they'll have the beast right on their many heels.

[1] We have inside-out retinas, why did we not get them the right way around just like squid have? Why can we not synthesize vitamin C? OK, we evolved somewhere where it was available on every tree but would those few extra genes have bothered us? The dog under the table has them, why not we?

FIGlet http://www.figlet.org/ is a nice command-line tool for doing stuff like this. Can preview its fonts online here: https://patorjk.com/software/taag/

Thank you!