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Comment by ses1984 | Hacker News Reader

ses1984

There are two kinds of software: software no one uses, and software people complain about.

There's also software that was created to solve a specific problem that got misappropriated to do something else

There used to be an ISP called pilot.net. It was a crappy ISP but to solve its ISP billing problem it wrote a billing system for telcos.

There was a company that tried competing with AWS selling hosting based on hyperthreads of CPUs. It wrote its own provisioning system because it did not want to pay for Virtuozzo. The company's name used to be dotCloud.

> There's also software that was created to solve a specific problem that got misappropriated to do something else

Docker is a classic case. Docker must be the craziest, most over-engineered solution for packaging developer artifacts in the Universe.

In the same way that Dropbox is the most over-engineered solution for file sharing, when all you need is an SVN-backed directory with curltmpfs. ;)

What's the link between pilot.net and dotCloud? Did dotCloud use the billing system from pilot.net?

Also feature complete software that is regularly used by lots of people, but nobody complains about, because devs don't mess with it anymore. Think ls, grep, yes, ...

I will happily complain about grep. My complaints might not be valid but I'll happily do it. I hate that bsd and gnu grep are different. I can never remember when and which flag I need to pass when my expression has stuff in it the default can't handle. I don't like that it's slower than alternatives like ag. I wish it would automatically handle compressed data.

Also the saying is not as pithy if you add more kinds of software.

Devs can't mess with it anymore, you mean? There's a myriad alternatives to ls, grep, etc. Dunno about alternatives to yes, maybe there's a si/oui/da out there? :)

Sometimes the alternatives are considered superior to the originals (ripgrep) but the originals are just fossilized in place. In 2019 I don't even think we'd be able to have less as the pager instead of more, because we're so conservative about universals defaults, it's sad.

Well, sure. There are alternatives, but the original software stands as it is and is available out of the box. It's really useful to learn once and then use everywhere.

Why have I not heard this before?

Brilliant.

I'm going to file this right alongside "software is never finished, only abandoned"

I don't know if I would call it brilliant, it's pretty funny though. I didn't make it up.

Your quote is first said about art and attributed to Da Vinci.

There's also the almost never used software that people complain about being forced to use.

Mmm, very clever.

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