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makeitdouble

That's always the bind.

- If it fails: welp, we were right to not spend months on this discussion.

- If it wildly succeeds: welp, it's now too costly to change for so many users.

Having a mild and steady usage growing curve is a blessing that's too often overlooked.

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Knowing this and being the person (or part of the team) to first implement a thing is the true thrill of programming. You, sometimes exclusively you, understand the weight and permanence of the minor decisions you make. This is why non-programmers often find programmers hard to understand, overly picky about minor details, strangely emotional about things they have a hard time verbalizing and so on.

It's always frustrating and amusing to read an anecdote about a design flaw in something where the creator goes "Yeah, we discovered that X was a bad idea, but there were already almost 10 people using it so it was too late to change."

Tabs in makefiles is another classic.

Except tabs in makefiles only require ones to acknowledge 'makefiles use tabs and here are the rules'. It's otherwise only something for pedants to obsess over.

IPV4 address contention has a bit more real-world impact.

No one and I mean NO ONE had any clue how widely deployed IPv4 would end up being. It went literally beyond everyone's wildest expectations who was alive at the time of its inception.

I don't think anything I wrote disagrees. As someone who started implementing IP networks just a couple of years after RFC791 was published, I'd say that was completely correct. But more than 40 years later, the fact that it has gone beyond everyone's wildest expectations means some of those early design decisions are starting to bite. Unlike tabs in makefiles, which is just something certain types of people like to complain about.

> Unlike tabs in makefiles, which is just something certain types of people like to complain about.

http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch15s04.html

Which "certain type" are Stuart Feldman and Steve Johnson?

Maybe there should be a margin factor, just like in architecture. Build it for 5x the load, then 10x that.

Well ARPA already had a margin factror...they had about 256 computers that needed addresses, and left space for 2^24 times 256, or 4,294,967,296 computers.

The growth ended up to be exponential over time. So maybe a better margin would be expressed exponentially along the lines of "build it for 2^(doubling_constant * number_of_years) the load."

fair enough but cerf seemed to hint at the fact that 32bit was their lower estimate, I meant to multiply that number.

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