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Comment by CoolGuySteve | Hacker News Reader

Unless the overhead is truly polluting, as in using a significant amount of electricity or physical computers, the thesis contained in this article seems like a good way to worry about bullshit that truly, profoundly, just doesn’t matter.

So be wise before inflicting this staggering bullshit on your colleagues. Pick your battles.

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OTOH, most of the Web is slow and crappy thanks to layer after layer of piled up “saving 95% of a small number isn’t worth my time” attitudes.

And yet they invented another technology (amp) to solve the crappy situation. Thus, people added more layers over existing layers.

The only "staggering bullshit" I see is acting like elegance is a luxury, and waste is irrelevant, and the only value is to ship something, anything, in as little time as possible. (As if the only metrics that matter are the ones that can be evaluated by non-engineers and correlate with short term business outcomes, hm...).

The problem is that this attitude leads not only to waste and inefficiency but also to insecure, unreliable, buggy systems that are incomprehensible even to the people who build them, because they are built on layers of poorly understood, overly complicated trash.

So we have laziness, incompetence, and waste at every level of the stack, and this is celebrated as efficiency.

If 100 things are each responsible 1% of the total "pollution", how significant would you rate each of them?

Also don't overlook that just one byte more can double the amount of packets that need to be sent for something, just a little bloat can mean individual items in a list of millions no longer fully fit in the CPU cache, and so on. We also can't really know how many times things (that are put on the web) get handled by how many computers and users, so any byte you save could be multiplied by infinity. If I can do it easily, cutting out bloat is always good IMO. Personally, I find it enjoyable.

Removing spaces from the end of lines, changing double spaces in HTML to one, and using tabs for indentation, these are a few of my favorite things.

And most importantly, use only one-letter variables. Mother Earth will thank you.

I find myself doing the opposite, since I write stuff once (at most, since there is auto-complete and copy & paste), but read it a lot more often. I find reading long variable names takes exactly as long as reading short words, but with less mental overhead. So instead of something like srv_mem_max, I have stuff like "server__max_allocated_memory". It doesn't affect the output or the compiled result, after all.

I think, and hope, the throwaway was being sarcastic. :)

For Sublime Text, you can add "trim_trailing_white_space_on_save" to the user settings and set it to true :)

VS Code is very similar, with the additional support for .EditorConfig files.

I do have a new line at the end of files now so that Git doesn't complain. That and new lines before some curly braces (either JS/TS/C#, can't recall which) is the only thing I've changed over the last decade+. The fact that I don't recall which I do where suggests I might want to reevaluate that, if it's not in a language that's going to compile it out.

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