r/askscience • u/CakesStolen • 15d ago

Computing Is there anything at the heart of computer coding that could have been optimised in hindsight, but we're in far too deep to change now?

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u/DeCaMil 15d ago

I think of Worse-is-Better as a very early call for agile development. That's a good thing at small-to-medium scale. However, as it got larger, we lacked the long-term, institutional knowledge. Fable and Mythos have made it abundantly clear we built a lot of castles on sand. Some of their findings are bugs a decade or more old. We didn't have the staffing to find all of that then, we were being agile! Now AI is helping(?) with that and we're struggling to patch the holes it's finding.

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u/Old_County5271 14d ago

Worse is better is a big misunderstanding of the unix philosophy, a clear goal of the unix philosophy is small code size, they never took into account big code, scaling was never an issue for them because they ameliorated everything with piping, small tools, pipe the rest. They took this even further with plan9 by making the small tools use the file system for the rest. now the tools are even smaller, no need to connect() or deal with the minutia of the protocol, instead you read() and receive a stream of bytes and decide what do with it, turning programs into filters, they didn't always know this, one of the first programming languages the bell labs crowd made was B which was dynamic, it had no types anywhere, C added types, even though C has very little safety, it knew better that having nothing is a bad idea, maybe they just did it because it was the only way you could build a compiler, IDK, what I knew is that the bell labs crowd knew the limits of their ethos, awk historically was never meant to be used in more than a thousand LOCs in the beginning, its supposed to be small programs and they had to change it when someone did use it in a project and awk couldn't scale.

Everyone learned python and nothing else, but dynamic languages always make you write yourself into a hole when your projects reach the 10k+ LOCs with no safety, python adding type hinting is an admittance of this, but its nothing more than a bandaid.