Hacker News Reader

Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

The interesting thing about this is that TeX continues to be reused 45 years after its inception; new libraries show up on CTAN regularly, and of course TikZ and LaTeX are far from being in the original design of TeX. Very few libraries have shown the survivability and versatility of TeX. So maybe the way we think about software reuse is wrong.

You seem to be claiming that 20,000 lines of code constitutes a large program. Is that really your intention? I mean libjpeg is 34,000 lines of code, and LAPACK 3.6.0 (one of the very few libraries that excels TeX in reusability and enduring value) is 685,000 lines of code, and each of them is just a small part of many programs. I would instead describe the monolithic parts of TeX and METAFONT as small programs of only 20,000 lines of code, omitting even dependencies on libraries.

View on HN

Yeah as I said it was a tongue-in-cheek comment and I don't believe it, just wanted to provoke some discussion. :-) But in any case what I meant is that TeX/MF are among his biggest programs (that I know of), not that 20000 lines is a large program (he calls it "medium" IIRC).

(Ironically, in my previous job supposedly using "modern" programming practices, a single Python file had organically grown to over 25000 lines in length and people complained to GitHub about the file not being rendered in full in the browser.)

I think the SAT solver he wrote recently is several times larger, but otherwise I agree.

> The interesting thing about this is that TeX continues to be reused 45 years after its inception; (...) So maybe the way we think about software reuse is wrong.

Incidentally you got it completely backwards. TeX is used because it's a convenient interface between higher level descriptions (i.e., book content) and the lower level output (pretty document formats). Thus, once again abstractions and interfaces show their value.

Additionally, TeX is used rarely by humans, while LaTeX is the tried and true workhorse. Again, an abstraction that targets a interface.

And how many TeX and LaTeX reimplementation a are there? Again, the interface and abstractions show their value.

It is absurd that my repeated, informed rebuttals of this rudely-phrased nonsensical misinformation are being flagged, so that visitors to the site will see only the aggressive misinformation and not the corrections. What kind of site are these people trying to turn this into?

This is not just a "poor me, I am being persecuted" issue. We can let Hacker News turn into Twitter, with insult contests being resolved by flagging campaigns that eventually hellban the accounts of the less-popular side of any issue, or into YouTube, dominated by conspiracy theories and hate; or we can stand up for reasoned discussion and informed comment.

Comparing svat's reply and yours, seems like the community filter works quite well.

Svat's reply is of course excellent and highly commendable, but they did not post it until after I posted my cri de cœur above. The thread consisted of [svat's reasonable comment], [my reasonable reply], [svat's reasonable reply], [troll post with reckless disregard for the truth], [flagged], [flagged], where the [flagged] posts were the ones where I was correcting the misinformation.

Also, note that the person who posted the misinformation never bothered to thank svat for their careful and courteous correction and their meticulous attempt to try to DWIM the troll comment into something that made some amount of sense. This makes more sense on the assumption that they were trolling than on the assumption that they were merely misinformed — someone who was interested in the truth would surely have offered thanks for such a helpful and polite correction. Instead, it seems clear that they were only posting here to make trouble and waste the time of reasonable, knowledgeable people like svat — particularly in light of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22424205.

I had already come to that conclusion because the comment was clearly based on a set of misconceptions about what TeX and LaTeX are, and how they relate to each other, which could have been corrected by reading the introductory paragraphs of the Wikipedia article for either TeX or LaTeX. If someone isn't investing even that level of care in their comments, they don't care whether they're talking nonsense or not.

We can see that the same account continues to post aggressive comments rudely attacking other users, although since I'm not familiar with the areas they're talking about, I can't tell if they're employing the same reckless disregard for the truth in these cases: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22501626 "I don't see the point of your post, and frankly sounds like nitpicking."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22499637 "Don't you understand where and why are there abstractions? ... having people [referring to the person he's replying to] naively complain"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22458752 "You may quote simplistic cliches"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22459638 "Your comment is unrealistic and even absurd"

Maybe you think this is the kind of dialogue we should be encouraging on here, but I don't. I think that in addition to setting an example of better behavior, as svat did, we should explicitly call out such misbehavior and explain why it isn't desirable, as I did.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com