JKCalhoun
Something I'll call Milito's Meadow [1]. Start with a
clean slate. Everything goes: fences, farmhouses, roads...
Down to the bare earth.Then build up again from scratch.
Likely you will in fact put a fence here or there-but of
course you'll know with certainty why it is there. (And
more times than not, there will be fewer fences when you
are done.)[1] Naming this for a friend who taught me about
fence razing.
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> stephantul
Extreme programming in a nutshell. I like doing this
to features: build it, then take it down and rebuild
but better.
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ChrisMarshallNY
I've found utility in removing code.I feel that doing the
job with the fewest lines of code, is best.I also believe
in focused/pure scope. If I write a type or API to do a
job, then it should do that job, and only that job. If I
want to add functionality that is out-of-scope, then I'll
often write another type, instead of adding it to the
existing one. Making this type of decision is always
fraught.But, like in all things, it depends. Sometimes,
reducing the overhead of things like setup and testing is
a good reason to not introduce a whole new resource, but I
should make it a point to document the reason for the
incongruity.This is especially true, when designing user
interface. I've found that, usually (not all the time,
though), less is more.Josef Albers is known (amongst other
things), for the quote "Sometimes, in design, one plus one
is three or more.".
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joshka
The counterpoint is that building software is not building
a fence. When you create something in software, nothing
tangible changes until that's accepted and running on all
the places that you deploy to. A PR is just a hey, here's
a fence that the contributor built elsewhere that proves
that building something like this is possible.The
corollary is design your open source libraries so they're
obvious enough that the chesterton's gaps are obvious.
Anytime an AI tool submits something that breaks your
expectation of things not being necessary it usually
highlights that there's a missing gap in the explanation
of what is necessary.
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> stephantul
I'm not sure I share your view of PRs. I still see
submitting PRs as something that puts pressure on
maintainers. Even incorrect PRs take time to verify
and review.I also don't see how this differs between
the "gap" and the "fence" part of the metaphor.
Whether someone submits a rewrite/removal (fence) or a
new feature (gap) for PR review, it's still going to
cost me attention.
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> > joshka
It's only pressure if you believe the social
contract in a PR is that everything that is
written is something you're obligated to read /
respond to. If you flip that a bit to a PR being
the first step in a way of saying "I tried a thing
and it worked, what's necessary to make that an
actual thing that other can use", then you will
sort of land here.Previously I wrote
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48517931
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ndr
Related to this, the concept of "free as in puppies" from
D. Richard Hipp, creator of SQLite:> Suppose you had a
pull request for SQLite. "Hey, I've got this new feature
for SQLite. Here's the pull request." When you want me to
pull that into the tree, you say, "Oh, it's free."> No,
it's not free. What you're doing is asking me - you've got
this cool feature, and you want me to maintain it for you,
to document it for you, to test it for you, to maintain it
for you for the next twenty-five years. That's not free.>
Linus Torvalds is famous for saying there's free as in
beer and free as in speech. But there's another kind of
freedom: free as in puppies. "Oh look, I've got a free
puppy for you." You see where this is going?> A pull
request is a free puppy. And then you've just got a kennel
full of puppies at the end of the day. And you can't just
throw them out - you're morally obligated to take care of
them for their natural life.> I don't want any free
puppies.source: https://youtu.be/x8_ZZhRL3YU?t=1715
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> stephantul
Thanks! This is very similar indeed. Related: I see a
lot of "drive-by" PRs by agents, who obviously have no
intent of ever maintaining the code they wrote.
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> > api
Puppy cannons. Puppy carpet bombing.
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> > > ChrisMarshallNY
A new definition of "puppy mill."
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> > > stephantul
Puppy slush automatically pushed through vents
into your codebase
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> akoboldfrying
FYI there are quite a few glitches in there:> and want
you want me to maintain it for you> to to document it
for you> Linus Torvalds is famous famous> A pool
request> They're you you're you're morally obligated
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> > ndr
Thank you, I was too eager copy-pasting YT
transcriptions.
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