@NEETzsche @r000t @graf

> it's because said 12yo is motivated by accomplishing an outcome and not motivated by "clean" or "good" code.

This is one of those things that has something to it as long as you are not taken literally, which you inevitably will be. (Cf., Moore's Law, Postel's Law, 90% of anything that Fred Brooks wrote.)

I've read what James Hague has to say about it, and he has a lot of very good points. (I have probably pasted a lot of URLs for his articles at you.) On the other hand, he's a game developer (and thus has a radically different lifecycle for his code than he would if he wrote distributed software) and I am old. (Maybe not as old as he is but old enough to know what I'm doing.) What constitutes "good" from my perspective is driven by practicality rather than some fantasy a dude has in his 20s about what constitutes "good" code. The young guy will write 10k lines of "clean" C++ to accomplish what an awk one-liner does, he's got no scar tissue and is prone to compulsive masturbation (technical and otherwise). VCs love this because in their view, either the market is cornered or the business is a failure, so they turn everything into a moonshot because a VC makes way more money with one unicorn and ninety-nine flops than with a hundred sensibly run modestly successful businesses.

"Good" in my case is informed by having run Pleroma for years and knowing the shape of fedi traffic and what is fast and what is slow and what should be faster and how to handle that, knowing what sort of things I want the software to do, knowing the general shape of the unknown unknowns you run into with stuff like this, and knowing the process of long-term maintenance and debugging a network, which is different from spot-welding a feature.

> inspired work has a habit of not following rules.

You've got to master the rules before it's meaningful for you to break them. A kid shoves a goto into a function and the code is worse; Ken puts a goto into a function and the code is better, and there's a good reason why. Arthur Whitney dispenses with line breaks and his code is densely packed and nigh-unreadable even to an experienced hacker, but the reason he does that is different from the reason a clown does it. An idiot breaks the rules and you get Clerks, a genius breaks them and you get Waiting for Godot.

> IDDQD was supposed to be a publishing house, but the early 2020s happened and I ended up just being here. It was initially a paid blog in 2019 but we shifted from that into print media, and only got our first real issue out in early 2023.

Oh, that's cool shit. Congrats!

> They never got on fedi because they regard it as a Twitter clone, and they all hate Twitter. So my entrenchment in fedi is kind of an accident in other efforts.

Ah, yeah. I think most of the things that make Twitter hellish don't apply here, but I can see it leaving a bad taste in someone's mouth.

> I attached a few covers of the zine, which you can find here: https://iddqd.pub/

That is seriously awesome.

> Well, in this case, it was because they were a project maintainer and I was PRing them.

Yeah, usually when that kind of thing happens, I just leave it. There's enough work to do without wasting time: ultimately, they'll do what they want with the project and I've sent my PR and I'll make adjustments if they want adjustments but if they don't like it and we can't work together, I should probably do my hacking elsewhere. Sounds like you had the same kind of experience.