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by thoughtpolice
4010 days ago
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Are you being serious, or just trying to sound super philosophical about why "less is more"? I assume it's the latter, because it shouldn't take very much thought to see why HTTP servers are fairly complex pieces of software, given the purpose they serve - a class of software that is ruthlessly optimized in today's world - nor should it take very much thought to see this HTTP server is actually ridiculously inefficient compared to any modern one. You know, wasting all those precious CPU cycles you opine so much about? (Now, if you want to talk about the actual efficacy of HTTP vs other stateless protocols, that's a different story... But I doubt we're going to go there in a thread about an assembly HTTP server where people are ooh'ing over the achivement. Not that it isn't cool, TBQF.) Programmers at large really need to stop being pretend philosophers clutching at straws about "why things are so darn bad today!!!" (among other psuedo philosophical positions). They're mostly terrible at it, and it's almost always just so damn hamfisted and full of itself. |
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There is a long (albeit minority) tradition of thinking this way in computing, one that values small, intelligible systems as the best way for humans to work with computers. An example of this philosophy surfaced here recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9689800) and there are countless others.
HN itself has a rich history with this model. It was created by a practitioner of it, is written in a language inspired by it, and the smallness and intelligibility of the code are always on our minds when we work on it.
We need more projects like this. They are deeply satisfying systems to build and work with, because they're human-scale in the way that behemoth software is not.