Only sort of related but this reminded me of something that struck me recently:
A great benefit of being dumb is never knowing something was too obvious to be worth logic
Often in comedies, there will be a scene where the dummy helps the genius reach some epiphany just by applying simple reasoning to a point the genius glossed over
It’s the configuration complexity clock.
You hardcode values in an established, full-featured programming language.
That gets annoying, so you push some into config files.
That’s not powerful enough, so you let the config files include conditionals.
Soon your config files are more like scripts, but it’s so easy to keep adding features…
And suddenly you’re back to hardcoding, but in a newer, jankier programming language.
NOPE! Nope. That’s the too far point. Abort. Abandon ship. Start over.
Good Grug brain.
Grug make thinky box do good.
Grug too dumb to understand impossible.
Peers say server too weak for search. Grug write custom search. Customer happy. Boss happy. Peers say it fail edge case. Grug shrug.
Peers say web app can’t use CLI tool. Grug make extension. Customers happy. Boss happy. Peers say that cheating. Grug too dumb for rules.
Grug code small. Get used lots. Peers code big. Argue about reviews. Never get deployed.
Grug strongest there is
“Grug too dumb for rules” is legitimately good programming advice.
Only sort of related but this reminded me of something that struck me recently:
A great benefit of being dumb is never knowing something was too obvious to be worth logic
Often in comedies, there will be a scene where the dummy helps the genius reach some epiphany just by applying simple reasoning to a point the genius glossed over
I think this is pretty realistic
i prefer referring to greenspun’s tenth
So this is exactly talking about Nix, Guix, chezmoi?
Don’t know about chezmoi, but Nix and Guix use a proper programming language that is also suited as a configuration file format, no?
So they’re at noon and might just stay there
guix yeah, since they picked a pre-existing one. nix the language is arguably an overgrown dsl which explaits why it’s… real weird.
I guess nix started at noon of the next day lol
That’s excellent. I think the initial momentum towards a DSL is basically equivalent to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect