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The Lindy effect in software

clemsau.com

41–45 of 45 posts

Re: The Lindy effect in software

#41
post #30
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Lindy effect is less about making strong arguments about which tool to use in debates, and more about calling out and explaining a real life phenomenon. I've invoked it in my job mostly to explain to younger developers why learning vim keybindings+terminal git usage while they have the most plasticity is most likely going to be a good bet for the remainder of their career, as editors, operating systems an…

> I've invoked it in my job mostly to explain to younger developers why learning vim keybindings+terminal git usage Interesting - I see it as the opposite: learning the git CLI is pointless. It’s slow, clunky and it doesn’t teach you any of the very interesting inner-workings of Git. There are much better things to spend time learning, especially if your editor has a native git integration.

You should learn internals as well, it's not mutually exclusive :)

But at some point you have to teach your fingers some movements that will ideally make you fast on as many machines, as many operating systems, as many editors and as many keyboards for as many years of your career as possible.

Re: The Lindy effect in software

#42
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I think the idea that rewrites are good way to achieve more maintenable software is basically always based on a delusion. It is a very common and well understood delusion for programmers who always see the existing code as crap and imagine a beautiful world when they could only rewrite it. A well understood mistake: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... In the context of free software…

The issue with not rewriting or rebuilding things is that you miss out on the opportunity for conceptual changes and new approaches to solve problems in more robust and elegant ways. For example, Unreal Engine 6 will depreciate and eventually remove it's existing Actor based scenegraph with an entity component system. This is essentially a rewrite of the core of the engine, and it's a massive conceptual change away f…

Ok, you are right. There are situation where something should be re-designed from scratch. I am also not against building something new or better alternatives. But I would still argue that far more often than not rewrites are misguided.

Re: The Lindy effect in software

#43

If we had followed this more seriously in the past, we would have still stuck on to writing C for enterprise applications and had way too many memory bugs. Aren’t we glad there was a demographic who said no to C and brought the revolutionary idea to use Java instead? Couldn’t a Lindy enthusiast have gone “umm but isn’t Java too new and shouldn’t we just stick to C which is well trodden and understood??” It’s easy to…

> Couldn’t a Lindy enthusiast have gone “umm but isn’t Java too new and shouldn’t we just stick to C which is well trodden and understood??” I think people often misrepresent history because they view it with the benefit of hindsight. People who chose to use Java didn't do it to embrace a revolutionary idea, they were embracing an evolutionary one. It seemed like a natural optimization step, rather than a clean slate…

Clojure is Lisp, Guile is Lisp, Racket is Lisp, R and Julia have Lisp under the hood; but the spirit of Lisp also lives on in Javascript, Ruby, Rust, and every functional programming language ever, plus all the languages that incorporated functional features including Python, Perl, and Go, and languages that didn't until they did, like C++ and Java. And Emacs.

Re: The Lindy effect in software

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still better than AI, it has personality and not paragraphs of empty prose

you might be confused as to what terrific means

Probably not, given that "terrific" was almost certainly used sarcastically here.

Re: The Lindy effect in software

#45
post #14

Terrific writing. Just terrific. Copied verbatim: The Lindy effect in software The longer a tech has been around, the more robust it is seen as compared to more recent ones, we often talk about a technology’s maturity The C language SQL has been around for a while, https://antonz.org/fancy-ql/ JS libraries seem to come and goes

I just realized my article was shared on HN (wasn't aware of the visite spike until 7 days later).

Will work on the writing, I truly agree that my writing isn't the best. Thanks for pointing it out.

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