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Comment by fullstackchris | Hacker News Reader

I think about this stuff from time to time... If we think out into the future (50-100 years?)... will there eventually be such a huge footprint for frameworks / packages that there is nobody who remembers how some of the old dependencies were written? Interesting to think of a future bug where nobody would know the solution because it lies so deep in a dependency somewhere :)

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You might find a talk[0] from Jon Blow on this very subject from last year interesting.

[0] https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk

Jonathan Blow publicly criticizes Twitter engineering for being unproductive because they haven't released many user-facing features. He regularly berates the entire web industry without knowing anything about how it works.

His knowledge is limited to an extremely tiny domain of programming, and he regularly berates people for not following his philosophy. Meanwhile, it took him eight years to make The Witness. What did he build with his eight years time? A first person puzzle game with essentially no interactive physics, no character animations, and no NPC's to interact with. (I actually enjoy The Witness, fwiw.) The vast majority of developers do not have the budget to spend eight years on a single title, and wouldn't want to even if they did.

The most notable thing about Jonathan Blow is how condescending he is.

If that's what you take away from Jonathan Blow then you need to detach from your emotions a bit. He annoys me with how much his condescending attitude towards web development (because I'm a web developer) - but he justifies his positions and is open to argument about it. His talks (like that one linked above) are really inspirational, and he's released two highly successful product: two more than the majority of people you'll ever meet.

He's passionate and smart and interesting - and writing him off like that, I think, is not justified.

I thought much more highly of him when I didn't work in games and I was a web developer. Now that I work in games I don't think very highly of him. He's an uncompromising fundamentalist that sends would-be game developers down impossibly unproductive paths of worrying about minutia that will never matter to their projects before they've ever built their first game. He's famous for being a rude guest in both academia and in conferences. He's basically the equivalent of someone that says that you should NEVER use node because node_modules gets big and if you're writing a server it should be in Rust and if it isn't you're bad and you should feel bad. His worldview does not at all take into account the differing problems faced by differing people, having differing access to resources and differing budgets and time constraints. He is _only_ concerned with how you should work if you have no deadlines, an essentially unlimited runway, and your most important concern is resource efficiency. For most games projects, the production bottleneck is not CPU or GPU efficiency: it's the cost of art production. What he has to say is, for the vast, vast majority of people, not applicable. He is, essentially, an apex predator of confirmation bias.

The thing about Jonathan Blow is that for a lot of people, he's the first graphics-focused outspoken programmer that they run into and so they think he's some form of singular genius. He isn't.

That is a plot point in Vernor Vinge's Deepness in the Sky

I bet in corporations this is already happening. But in public frameworks and such it will never happen since each generation wants to write their own framework.

Programmer/Archeologist

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