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Comment by xiwenc | Hacker News Reader

Git is a special case i would say . Because it is fairly self contained. It had minimal dependencies on external components. It mostly relied on filesystem API. Everything else was “invented” inside of Git.

This is special because most real world systems has a lot more dependencies. That’s when experimentation is required. Because one cannot know all relevant API’s beforehand and their behaviors. Therefore the only way is to do it and find out.

Algorithms are in essence mathematical problems, therefore is abstract and should be able to be solved in the head or use pen and paper.

Reality is that most programming problems are not algorithms but connecting and translating between systems. And these systems are like blackboxes that require exploration.

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> Git is a special case i would say . Because it is fairly self contained. It had minimal dependencies on external components. It mostly relied on filesystem API. Everything else was “invented” inside of Git.

This type of developer tends to prefer building software like this. There is a whole crowd of hardcore C/C++/Rust devs who eschew taking dependencies in favour of writing everything themselves (and they mostly nerd-snipe themselves with the excessive NIH syndrome, like Jonathon Blow off writing Powerpoint[1]...)

Torvalds seems to be mostly a special case in that he found a sufficiently low-level niche where extreme NIH is not a handicap.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2nkimbPphY&list=PLmV5I2fxai...

It's really easy to remember the semantics of C. At least if you punt a bit on the parts that savage you in the name of UB. You know what libc has in it, give or take, because it's tiny.

Therefore if you walk through the woodland thinking about a program to write in C there is exactly zero interrupt to check docs to see how some dependency might behave. There is no uncertainty over what it can do, or what things will cost you writing another language to do reasonably.

Further, when you come to write it, there's friction when you think "oh, I want a trie here", but that's of a very different nature to "my python dependency segfaults sometimes".

It's probably not a path to maximum output. From the programming is basically a computer game perspective it has a lot going for it.

Lua is basically the same. An underappreciated feature of a language is never, ever having to look up the docs to know how to express your idea.

ie closed off systems that don't interact with external systems.

and these are the type of coders that also favor types.

whereas if you do the 'informational' type programs as described by Rich hickey -- ie interact with outside systems a lot. you will find a lot of dependencies, and types get in the way

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