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by username90 2384 days ago
> I have no idea why "hacking" aka "going fast and breaking things" is so glorified while "building good reliable programs" aka "good programming" is not.

Going fast is revered, breaking things is not. And why is going fast so important? It is because an individual can't accomplish much when going slow. Why are individual works important? Because individuals do things that would never get funding, they make decisions that would never pass a committee and they can pivot the entire direction of a project many times in a single hour without any issues. Therefore many problems can only be solved by hackers as large teams are too restricted to do them.
1 comments
atoav 2384 days ago
It is entirely possible to do something slow and well and still do it alone and esentially without funding. As a film maker this is one of the things I love about writing and programming: there is no money needed only your time (which of course also costs you something). But it is perfectly possible to sit alone in your chamber and write a great piece of software that competes with the best out there. Try doing that in Film. This would be really a field where you wouldn’t get far without people and money.

Whether you hack it together quickly or meditate on it for ages doesn’t has much to do with it, I’ve seen both. Maybe the person with the quick hack just tries to solve a problem while the slow person likes the intellectual challenge of solving it in a “good” way.

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username90 2384 days ago
Quick hacks can often compete with the best out there precisely for the reasons I mentioned, git is a good example. Then of course when something becomes big it stops being a quick hack and starts having a huge maintenance team, but it was still a quick hack in the beginning.
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Avamander 2384 days ago
> It is entirely possible to do something slow and well and still do it alone and essentially without funding.

Like?

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atoav 2384 days ago
Horizon EDA was started by a guy who didn’t want to use a closed source EDA tool like Altium for his final university electronics project and wasn’t happy with KiCAD.

He planned it very carefully (so I wouldn’t call it a hack) and years after it is still going without any funding. This isn’t that uncommon in open source IMO.

Of course this is not a value judgement, there are quick hacks that work perfectly well and slower more planned out projects that never work at all — each aproach has it’s pros and cons.

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