[foxes]

Based comment.

Same mindset applies to lots of things on HN: C vs Rust, Php vs typescript, email vs chat app.

Majority of HNers seem like they are seething that change happens and what they learnt before is the only correct choice. Best way is to appreciate and learn from the past but be still be open to new things. Being stuck ages you into obsolescence.

[Gigachad]

HN is the embodiment of the "old man yells at cloud" meme. The world moves on and they are angry that the next generation doesn't care about writing perl scripts for their custom gentoo install.

>Old movies are good because back in my day they just made them better. Now all they make is mass produced crap!

[didericis]

Being stuck due to arrogance is bad. Changing arbitrarily is also bad. Being open to new things does not mean all new things are automatically good. Being like old things does also make things automatically good. What is "good" is very very tricky to define, and context dependent.

[DrewADesign]

What is inherently bad about arbitrary change? Sure it's bad in user interfaces and stable systems, but in the grand scheme of things those are edge cases. Why does it matter if some æsthetic preference changes arbitrarily?

[didericis]

The fact that you consider stable systems edge cases speaks to the issue.

Wealth is built up over generations via systems that are extensible and reusable by those that come after. If we changed the standard size of screws because we thought it looked better aesthetically, we'd instantly make massive swaths of previous work unusable.

Exploratory change is needed to figure out where improvements can be found, and I generally enjoy building and working with novel technology much more than trying to interface with older systems, but there should be some sort of purpose for the change. Older systems also need a certain amount of pruning and destruction to remove accumulated cruft, so it's not like it's always best to use what's been accumulated.

The correct balance is hard. Achieving that balance requires intentional effort, not arbitrary change or arbitrary preservation, if only in some sort of testing/evaluation phase (sometimes it does make sense to just arbitrarily tweak stuff and see if it ends up working better, but you need to actually do some sort of intentional verification to see if it's worth keeping).

[DrewADesign]

Change controlled systems are an edge case in the world at large. I agree that arbitrary change is bad in systems but that's not what you said.