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Comment by dansalvato | Hacker News Reader

"suckless" is a perfect name for this software suite—not because of the name's literal meaning, but because they are advertising their insufferable elitism right on the tin.

Yes, building software to solve a limited set of problems can lead to great software. But for god's sake, if your core philosophy is that you're better than everyone else, then you're primarily going to attract developers and users who also think they're better than everyone else.

The result is that instead of contributing to a mission that conveys a useful message, you just dig an elitist moat around yourselves that people can't float across unless their egos are so inflated that they're buoyant.

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> if your core philosophy is that you're better than everyone else, then you're primarily going to attract developers and users who also think they're better than everyone else.

That's an unfair characterization. Their philosophy[1] says nothing of the sort. The gist of it is a focus on building software with "simplicity, clarity and frugality" in mind, targeted at "advanced and experienced computer users". There's nothing elitist about that.

It's a rejection of the trend of making complex, hard to use and maintain software. Have they gone too far, and end up alienating most users? Perhaps. But people like their software because of their goals and design sensibilities, not because they want to become part of some elite club. That's an old and boring argument people often apply to Unix/Linux users as well. Do better.

[1]: https://suckless.org/philosophy/

Not that I mind their goals or philosophy, but isn't catering to "advanced and experienced computer users" a clear case of elitism?

I wouldn't say so. It doesn't imply that these users are superior, just that the software is targeted at that audience. This is no different than software targeted at children, novice users, or any other group of users.

But then again, they do mention they want to avoid "stupid questions" from novice users on the dwm page, so there is an air of superiority there I don't support.

"stupid questions" doesn't sound too bad until you actually experience the deterioration of communities. For suckless I don't think it's a threat, as their specialization already filters the 99 percent. But try to find, for example, a community for experts in Java. I personally think it is a fine language, but it was designed to appeal to beginner/intermediate programmers, and any community around it suffers from that. You wouldn't believe how many people just open Github issues (with nothing but a title - the default issue template left untouched) for any NullPointerException, regardless if it is related or not.

StackOverflow is an interesting case also, they get a lot of criticism for being "toxic", but it is getting difficult to get answers to actually interesting questions. "How do i read a CPU register in C?" gets answered with "why would you want to access the CPU registers ??? It is an low level implementation detail therefore you cannot read them".

I hear you, I regret making such a generalization, and my negatively was uncalled for. Thanks for reminding me to check myself.

> Their philosophy[1] says nothing of the sort

Their philosophy doesn't, but their page for dwm[0] does :D

"Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it's pointless to make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase small and elitist. No novices asking stupid questions. There are some distributions that provide binary packages though."

[0] https://dwm.suckless.org/

Welp, I stand corrected. :D

I have to say, that is a bit obnoxious. Still, I don't think it's right to generalize that their users ascribe to that mentality. Quality software can be produced by people we don't agree with morally.

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