On Fri, 15 May 2009, Mate Nagy wrote:
Minimalism is a good thing to consider while developing software, but
obsessing about it is no better than with anything else. I'm as annoyed
with huge monstrous software like OpenOffice or Gnome or even Firefox as
anyone, but wanting to take away the features of the CLI userland that
make it comfortable is mad.
I was just about to write the exact same thing. However, coreutils could
likely use some love to cut down on functionality duplicated across
binaries, not to mention some extraneous options which few people ever
use. In my opinion, it's about finding the balance between simplicity (so
that people can hold the entire model of a command/utility in their head)
and features (to allow users to achieve something without spending all of
their time trying to fill in the gaps with awk.)
I say dwm (for example) is good because it's good, not because it's
suckless. The sucklessness is certainly part of its goodness, but not
all. If it was uncomfortable, would anyone use it? and it's still only
marginably usable with a multi-monitor configuration - proper handling of
this would require adding of this "bloat" everyone hates so much.
Exactly. dwm was largely well-adopted initially because there were no
alternatives for dynamically managing windows. Since then, awesome and
xmonad have largely poached the people looking for features and
extensibility, while dwm has remained the ideal minimal core to play with
and experiment on. People advocating for the recreation of cut-down
versions of things just to be suckless fail to see that these will suck
just as much, only there will be fewer useful _and_ extraneous features.
Take it from me: I hate Wirth's Law, and I try to implement minimal,
well-specified utilities myself, but I try to do this in a way which
_improves_ on existing models instead of wasting my time duplicating
existing efforts.
Brendan MacDonell
