I think everybody who's spent any time in the industry will agree with the feeling to some level. That being said the "harfmul stuff" table is a prime example in flamewar-bait, I seriously hope nobody will take it at face value. CVS better than SVN? Anything from plan9 instead of stuff people actually use? Good luck getting 9p to work reliably faster than NFS... Oh and you should use ed instead of vim, tcc instead of gcc and awk intead of ruby.<p>If this table is not meant as pure bait then I think it's actually harmful on its own, an experienced dev will be able to pick the right tool for the right job on their own. On the other hand a beginner will be tempted to cargo cult it to seem hardcore without understanding the tradeoffs.<p>Sometimes it's simpler to reuse a complex solution than write your own simple code from scratch. It's easier and simpler to use C++'s std::map than implement a red-black tree from scratch in C.
Anyone who has worked with CSV knows that it is anything but "less harmful"<p>Edit: I'd seen this page before, but never really appreciated the sheer arrogance of it until now. It's troll bait.
Uriel, the creator of this page, has committed suicide in 2012[1]. As far as I know, the website hasn't seen that much support since then. We could only guess, what he would've added to the list today.<p>My favourite page is the one with programming quotes[2]. I don't know, who that Al Viro is, but he is quite a savage.<p>[1] <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.os.plan9/xEb4wYzfaBc" rel="nofollow">https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.os.plan9/xEb4wY...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://quotes.cat-v.org/programming/" rel="nofollow">http://quotes.cat-v.org/programming/</a>
I'm known to my coworkers to complain about things I dislike and that I dislike almost everything.<p>This page lists things even I like.<p>It doesn't even go on to explain <i>why</i> the things are better or worse. Well, it sort've does, if you look for the bad things on the left side. But then he goes into FUD from decades ago that's particularly not relevant to today (in C++ specifically, probably also true for other bad things).<p>I'm all for ranting about terrible software but at least make sure it's accurate and versioned/dated.
So this is a list of "harmful things" and "less harmful alternatives", with no explanation given as to how each tech has been classified. To take a random example, why is man less harmful than info?
Fun little story, I used to be sympathetic to the all software sucks movement and attitude. Then I tried to port `st` (simple terminal) to Mac OS X by separating its core from its X11-dependent code and pulling the globals into a single struct, so that I could wrap it with NSView. When I tried to ask the `st` community if they wanted my changes[1], they replied that these changes were unnecessary, that coupling the core with X11 was perfectly fine, and especially that there's no reason to port it to such an awful non-free OS as Apple's. I now prefer to take a constructive and positive approach to software development, instead of just having a negative or cynical attitude.<p>[1] <a href="https://lists.suckless.org/dev/1408/23366.html" rel="nofollow">https://lists.suckless.org/dev/1408/23366.html</a>
Listing FreeBSD, D, Java, C++, and SQL databases as "harmful stuff", and suggesting "hierarchical file systems" and "textual interfaces" as not harmful. What the actual hell?
Bah. This is just smug, elitist taste-grumbling. There's no coherent argument.<p>I've written "Why software sucks" too, but I like to think I actually had a point.
I’m sure we’ve all seen the various famous examples of this kind of opinion and attitude floating around the Internet over time, but I’m not sure what value they really have. They’re mostly unhelpful aphorisms that don’t really offer any context or argument.
The “less harmful alternatives” are simpler only in a surface-level way. Go is “simpler” than Python in that the language has less features, but that leads to more complex code since there is less possibility to abstract things away. It is also a very hard language to write reliable code in, and reliability seems to be the stated goal of this whole thing. Python is hard to write reliable code in too, but Go is not a good alternative in this aspect.<p>Also, many of these alternatives make no compromise for practicality. GCC sucks, we can all agree, but without it our code would be slow and buggy (TCC doesn’t support ASan or other such debugging tools AFAIK).
Last discussed in 2014: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613239" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613239</a>
The only rationale given here is this:<p>> At the moment a detailed rationale is not provided for most of this, so figuring out why some things are considered more or less harmful than others is left as an exercise for the reader. Here is a hint: complexity is the bane of all software, simplicity is the most important quality. See also: Worse is Better by Richard Gabriel.<p>This is, well, just another way for people to turn their opinions into objective fact. The lumping of C++, D, Python and Ruby all together betrays either a lack of sincerity, or over-opinionation to the point of myopia.<p>The page links to Zed's rant about how Rails is a ghetto, while he makes some great points about the economics of that ecosystem, I'm left with no salient reasons why I shouldn't choose Rails for a project. Sure, if I want to do what <i>he</i> tried to do in that space, I have no reason to not expect I'll have the same kind of experience he did. The Rails community might be a ghetto, but my project doesn't have to be.<p>Read between the lines and you see Zed does have respect for Ruby and the Zen of the language. To see it linked on cat-v, to my mind looking for real reasons why people should and shouldn't do things, well, the essay clashes pretty hard with the seeming ideology that "complexity is the bane of all software." Zed was perfectly fine with Rails and all its complexity, he just hated the community and ecosystem. Cat-V is linking to his essay not because they actually agree with him, but because they are enamored with his style.<p>The whole site reads like a bunch of neckbeards blowing off steam.
Not sure who prepared this list but obviously this is extremely subjective.<p>C is less harmful alternative to Java? Are you kiddin' me? Have you ever tried creating any non-trivial web service with ANSI C?<p>For almost every example on the list I could bring examples showing situation where exactly opposite is true.<p>The old rule of thumb is, any definitive and unsubstantiated statements about superiority of any technology over any other technology should not be trusted.
I think everyone can agree that software sucks cause of X, Y, and Z.<p>But, when I see a list like this. Its quite obvious that this is coming from a mindset of the average user should not be using software at all.<p>Imagine if you will, your grandma always calling you up because she got lost in the textual interface. Yeah that would get old fast.<p>Also how would one look at cat pictures through a textual interface?
Years ago, I was complaining to a co-worker about a terrible codebase. He looked at me and said, "ok, when was the last time you looked at a program and thought, 'wow, this is really good code'?" That simple statement changed the way I view software quality forever.
"Less harmful alternatives" seems in many cases to be "Exotic technologies hardly used by anyone, simply unusable in any serious environment". In some cases, comically wrong: C as a better alternative to C++ ? Did I totally miss the obvious satirical nature of the page ?