Comment by SoSoRoCoCo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SoSoRoCoCo | Hacker News Reader

I'm reading a book by Richard Hamming and in it he discusses the methodical precision by which researches developed the first computers and programming languages. The thought, the debate, the endless thought experiments done before a single component was built.

Then on the front page of HN today there is an article about K&R and Unix, which lead to a rabbit hole of reading. Again, the thought process, the methodology, the amount of design and specification done before even beginning to build Unix.

Now compare this to the first big invention of the late 20th/early-21st century: the web browser. It was driven by a race to monopolize the internet and maximize profit, a war of standards, and the consequences of poor planning hurt us today.

`innerText` isn't just -another- quirk that wastes precious human memory, at a higher level it is also a testament to what I see is a decline in rigor among applied computer science that started in the 90's and has dominated: Hack. Ship. Patch later (maybe). Or to quote the anti-mantra: "move fast and break things."

I think the web browser was developed in an online world of instant communication and broad participation. It was a new paradigm.

Read about how andreesen at uiuc would would get an email and just add the feature.

The decline of rigor made computing accessible. Do you really want computing to become like civil engineering or biotechnology? Where changing the shape of a button would require several committee meetings followed by ethics board clearance and regulatory approval before anything gets done.

"A straw man ... is a form of argument and an informal fallacy of having the impression of refuting an argument, whereas the proper idea of argument under discussion was not addressed or properly refuted.[3] One who engages in this fallacy is said to be "attacking a straw man". "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

I don't think it's a straw man to note that what you want (rigour) comes with a cost (accessibility of development). The decline in rigour among applied computer science corresponded with an increase in software availability, economic output, and probably also literal lives saved.

I don't deny that it's frustrating to be stuck with poor choices, ones which cause confusion and make development difficult. However, I think that this method got more software in the hands of people sooner than the counterfactual high rigour world. There's definitely an argument to be made that there's an inflection point, where the rigourous method is slower up until some point where it becomes a better baseline, and from there software development accelerates and overtakes our current world. I think it's hard to be confident in that argument, though.

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