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Your codebase doesn't care how it got written

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Re: Your codebase doesn't care how it got written

#21

Post by graemep »

ahartmetz wrote: post #17
graemep wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any evidence that open source code is lower quality? The leaks of proprietary code, and the many examples of known security issues, the quality issues evident is most software, and the opinions of people who work on proprietary software all suggest the opposite.

I remember reading a study on source code quality quite some years ago, maybe it was featured on Slashdot. The result was that the lowest quality and the highest quality source code was proprietary, open source code was "pretty good but not the best". And that high quality proprietary code was stuff like operating system kernels and network equipment firmware, not business applications.

That makes sense.

Open source OSes, for example, seem to be pretty high quality, at least with regard to general purpose OSes. In general open source application code seems pretty good too.

On the other hand there are highly regulated or safety critical fields or where uptime is mission critical where people are very motivated to produce high quality code and a lot of that is proprietary.

I hope people are not vibe coding that type of code!

Re: Your codebase doesn't care how it got written

#23

Post by unsupp0rted »

suzzer99 wrote: post #6
meetingthrower wrote: post #3

Amish craftsmen confronted with a nail gun and an impact driver. Yeah you can still build a house swinging your arm if you want, but others won't.

Yes, notoriously tech-averse software developers who hate tools that make their jobs easier.

Yes, on HN they do, notoriously.

Until just a couple years ago I would regularly read comments complaining when a website doesn't work because the hacker browses with javascript disabled, for example.

This isn't the early-adopter crowd: it's the refuses to even be a late-adopter crowd.

Re: Your codebase doesn't care how it got written

#26

Post by Nasrudith »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #23
suzzer99 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, notoriously tech-averse software developers who hate tools that make their jobs easier.

Yes, on HN they do, notoriously. Until just a couple years ago I would regularly read comments complaining when a website doesn't work because the hacker browses with javascript disabled, for example. This isn't the early-adopter crowd: it's the refuses to even be a late-adopter crowd.

It is the crowd that understands what parts are functional and in fact chooses security over the dancing bears of the world. It isn't an aversion to tech, it is an aversion to doing things which are worse. In this case massive bloat, ads, and tracking of websites which does the opposite of serving the user when they're just looking for text.

Adoption of technology shouldn't be a binary of 'use it for everything/refuse to use it for anything'.

Re: Your codebase doesn't care how it got written

#28

Post by boesboes »

spicyusername wrote: post #19
vips7L wrote: post #5

How about we just let people code how they want if the codebase doesn’t care how it gets written? If it doesn’t matter why must we use one particular tool versus another?

Because most code is paid for and the people paying want as much code as possible for as cheap as they can get it. If your code is expensive, the fact is that now someone can write it cheaper.

That's the real problem, people making decisions that think more code == more software == more value. We've been through this over and over again, managers think they know better, engineers left to clean up their mess

Re: Your codebase doesn't care how it got written

#29

Post by MajorLettuce »

suzzer99 wrote: post #4

How about we just let nature take its course and rely on developers' laziness, one of the virtues of a good programmer? I go to ChatGPT for basically any annoying code snippet and even functions now. I'm done ever having to guess at map reduce syntax again, or trying to remember if slice mutates the target array. I'm messing with with codex more and more. But I still don't trust it to design features for me. Maybe in…

It is not even laziness at this point. There is so many conflicting and convoluted config formats and utilities (especially in the javascript ecosystem) that if you made it your mission to know it all, you would literally spend your whole life on it.

Re: Your codebase doesn't care how it got written

#30

Post by hulitu »

suzzer99 wrote: post #4

How about we just let nature take its course and rely on developers' laziness, one of the virtues of a good programmer? I go to ChatGPT for basically any annoying code snippet and even functions now. I'm done ever having to guess at map reduce syntax again, or trying to remember if slice mutates the target array. I'm messing with with codex more and more. But I still don't trust it to design features for me. Maybe in…

> How about we just let nature take its course and rely on developers' laziness, one of the virtues of a good programmer?

That's what Microsoft does. The CVEs speak for themselves.

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