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0 pointsDeestan14y ago0 comments

> put your code on Github or the like and others will add any features that you're missing.

No they won't, because he hadn't even started on the "make it beautiful".

When I want to solve a new-ish problem, I can't imagine grabbing some barely working cowdung from some guy's github repo.

If he hasn't even tried to make it clean or readable, it'll take me more time to make sense of the mess than just rebuild it myself.

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4 comments · 2 top-level

scott_s14y ago· 2 in thread

It depends on just how useful, and how ugly, it is. See: http://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html

DeestanOP14y ago

WiB is more about appreciating barebone low-level tools, like C/Unix in the posted example. These tools are crude but technically polished, otherwise no-one would bother to use them.

scott_s14y ago

It depends on what you mean by "technically polished." Unix handles interrupted signal calls by returning an error code that means "I was interrupted." This technique bunts on the hard problem of rolling back OS operations. It is not "technically polished" in that it does not solve all of the hard problems in front of them. But it's still useful, and it caught on because people used it.

Gabriel's insight is not about low-level tools. It's about at what point can you bunt on the hard problems, have an ugly work-around, but still be useful enough that no one will use "the right thing" when it eventually comes about?

follower14y ago

> No they won't, because he hadn't even started on the "make it beautiful".

At the risk of sparking a language war--the iTunes control project is written in Python so it has a certain level of consistency to start with.

> When I want to solve a new-ish problem, I can't imagine grabbing some barely working cowdung from some guy's github repo.

One developer's cowdung is another developer's works-for-me code. :)

For me part of the standard development process is the "literature review" which consists of finding all the prior art (polished or not) and evaluating it. I'd much rather someone uploaded their code in any state than not at all. YMMV. :)

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