[HN Gopher] How user groups made software reuse a reality
___________________________________________________________________
How user groups made software reuse a reality
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 114 points
Date : 2024-03-02 19:51 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ztoz.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (ztoz.blog)
| ilaksh wrote:
| Interesting history, but I think a more interesting article for
| me would be about what actually caused modern software
| repositories/registries to be introduced and take off. Because
| that is the point where software reuse went into hyperdrive.
|
| Software registries and dependencies are often sneered at by some
| engineers as a source of bloat and poor quality code. But I think
| that having an overall negative attitude towards any software
| registry is a sign of a lack of perspective. Those registries
| have been the biggest improvement in software engineering ever.
|
| And people that suggest otherwise don't know what software
| engineering is or it's history.
| jwstarr wrote:
| Author here. Thank you for the feedback. I may tackle a history
| of the registries from netlib and CTAN forward in the near
| future.
|
| For this article, I deliberately kept the scope limited because
| it was getting rather long.
| dhosek wrote:
| I was around for the initial discussions on CTAN having run a
| popular FTP archive for TeX-related software in the late
| 80s/early 90s. Given the heterogeneity of computing platforms
| in those days (EBCDIC vs ASCII, bigendian vs littleendian, CR
| vs LF vs CRLF to separate lines, blocks vs streams for file
| structures), even a relatively straightforward text-based
| archive had its potential footguns. Add in the lack of
| anything resembling a reliable cross-platform scripting
| language (Perl was the first contender in this space, and
| didn't have the insane cross-platform reach TeX did at the
| time) and there were some rather heroic efforts to use TeX
| itself as the scripting platform. The best-known and most
| widely used of these would be docstrip which was used as a
| sort of WEAVE/TANGLE for TeX code, but I remember there being
| an effort to also do some translation of files and out of
| BASE64-encoded format for reliable cross-platform transport.
| The original CTAN FTP server in the UK also had the cool
| feature that if you wanted the contents of a directory,
| adding .zip to the end of that directory name would return
| the directory's contents zipped.
|
| Being a first mover has had its drawbacks of course. Most
| notably, the lack of any sort of versioning of dependencies
| and that everything is functionally in a single flat
| directory (even if on disk it's arranged in a hierarchical
| tree, that tree is flattened for all inputs). People who
| complain about the functionality of newer dependency managers
| have no idea how much better even the worst are compared to
| what it was like in the past.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| Indeed. In the old days, we had to write our own malware!
|
| Kids these days have it easy...
| whstl wrote:
| I really wonder who you are talking about.
|
| I never saw anyone ever, even in the deepest pits of the
| internet, complaining about software registries per se. Even
| ultra-crackpots rarely get to this level. The regular
| complaints are _always_ about very specific points around the
| culture of individual package registries. Even the most ardent
| NPM critic will be the first to admit that the general idea is
| _per se_ great, and it is in practice it is useful, but the
| execution is lacking in some aspects, often exclusively
| cultural. Nobody is trying to throw away the baby with the
| bathwater.
|
| Package registries are definitely useful and important. They
| don't need someone misrepresenting valid criticism in order to
| be useful.
|
| If anything it is the lack of empathy and the blindness to
| those tradeoffs that shows a lack of understanding of
| engineering itself, not only its history.
| darkerside wrote:
| Beware this mindset. While it is completely reasonable, know
| that probably hundreds of new software developers enter the
| workforce every day, they hear us bitching about package
| registries like npm, and lack the experience to distinguish
| baby from said bathwater.
| whstl wrote:
| A strawman? Sorry, but not sorry. I will keep defending
| mine and other people's ability to criticise things that
| have plenty of room for improvement.
| hun3 wrote:
| https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome might be a reasonable
| starting point for anyone looking for software curations.
| treve wrote:
| I was hoping this would go into SHARE and was not disappointed.
| I'm happy to see people interested in this era of our industry.
| bigkahuna2421 wrote:
| Fantastic timing as well. SHARE is this week in Orlando.
|
| https://www.share.org/Events/SHARE-Orlando-2024
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-03-03 23:02 UTC)