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by dahfizz
1023 days ago
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I am not anti-rewrite or anti-port. There exist good reasons to rewrite software. However, being "modern" is not a good reason. The gnu authors were not motivated to write the coreutils simply for the sake of modernity. And that is why their fork of ls has much greater staying power than all the "modern" forks. |
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It's worth pointing out that while exa uses the term "modern" to describe itself, fd and bat currently do not. And I can say with certainty that ripgrep never used the word "modern" to describe itself. I didn't like that strategy even back in 2016 personally, and specifically tried to avoid it.
With that said, to try to argue the point more directly, I do think this is a somewhat shallow concern. It's unclear to me how much predictive power using the word "modern" to describe a piece of software is. I don't like it because it's vague and its meaning is somewhat of a moving target. But broadly speaking, it does convey some things: non-POSIX, does bolder things in the name of user experience and maybe some other stuff. It's a pithy signal. But I'm not sure it has much to do with "staying power."
Presumably coreutils has staying power because there is purportedly a specification covering their behavior (kinda, not really, lol) and organizations responsible for maintaining them. So if you want staying power, stick with the stuff that has a high bus factor and is well funded. That's totally fine.