the strange nazism aside which is bad enough I honestly think their programming philosophy sucks.
Why is it sensible to configure a software in C and having to recompile it every time I make a change? Patching software through diffs is error prone and you basically have to fiddle around with the order as to not accidentally mess up your entire program, it makes the software basically non-extensible in a sane way because there's no interface between extension and core code. The line number limits on code also incentivize spaghetti code. If you want software that sucks less you don't need fewer line numbers, you need good program structure and design.
Have you even taken a look at their source code? I have read plenty of open source projects and suckless's code is about as unspaghettilike as it gets. I find their approach to programming a beautiful contrast to the piles of garbage upon other piles of garbage style over-engineered approach I have seen elsewhere.
I think you're pointing out procedural issues, but ultimately the proof is in the pudding. If what they're doing works for them, then its pretty hard to convince them otherwise. It would be easier to make your case if you could point out specifics.
Yeah, I'm not really sure if DRYing yourself to death is a good approach to software development. Ansible is really really easy to hack on and it's ~1.2mil LOC which probably horrifies the suckless devs.
I suspect a good deal of that 1.2M lines is in modules, isn't it? Rather like how people remark on how many lines are in Linux and overlook that it's overwhelmingly in drivers and the actual core system is much smaller.
I use st, it's one of the best terminal emulators I've found, and I'm not going to stop using it just because some possibly-associated dev made a kinda-sorta-tasteless joke when they named some random server.
It's just a social event they did. Nothing to it. The conversation continued a bit with a discussion on what exactly what means with "cultural marxism", and it's not as bad as this snippet might make it appear. But can't add context lest people give the benefit of the doubt, ey?
I actually like suckless software and I'm a little (lot) annoyed by the overwhelming "sides" of politics, especially the left because a lot of US tech comes from a left wing belief and sometimes people online beat me over the head with it and make me annoyed.
But, to be clear, there are three things here:
1) They're doing a Tiki Torch walk, during a time when it was heavily politicised.
2) They're adapting Nazi slogans as hostnames
3) They're denigrating "Cultural Marxism".
Any one of these alone I would probably defend, but 3 is a pattern and not a good one.
> 1) They're doing a Tiki Torch walk, during a time when it was heavily politicised.
No it wasn't; just in the US. Not everyone in the world is obsessed with the latest drama in the US.
I've done many torchwalks with scouts. In fact, they're used to celebrate the end of the Nazi occupation in my home town every single year on Sept 18th. Should we stop doing this because some yahoos on the other side of the world used some torches in some far-right march? This is "Hitler has a moustache, you have a moustache, ergo you must be a Nazi"-kind of logic.
> 2) They're adapting Nazi slogans as hostnames
A private server belonging to a single person, not the project. I have asked him plainly and directly about that and he avoided the question. I am also not impressed by this, but that doesn't make him a Nazi, and it certainly doesn't make everyone involved in the project a Nazi.
> 3) They're denigrating "Cultural Marxism".
A single person is (same one as the hostname). And like I said, there is a lot more to that conversation than the screenshot makes it out to be as there was a lot of confusion about what's intended with "cultural marxism". I really recommend you read the entire conversation in full, and while I don't personally agree with their take, it's also really not that bad.
>No it wasn't; just in the US. Not everyone in the world is obsessed with the latest drama in the US
In Germany the association between fascism and torch marches is even stronger and absolute a political symbol, it's an unambigious symbol that nobody adopts accidentally, and it is a contemporary political issue. So called 'Fackelmärsche' by far-right fraternities and far-right groups have been an issue over recent years.(https://www.dw.com/en/germany-torch-wielding-neo-nazis-march...)
Where do you think American Neo-Nazis get their symbolism from? The US invents a lot of culture, but this one is sadly on us.
So everyone walking with a torch in Germany is a Nazi...? You can find many images of people doing exactly that in Germany with a cursory internet search. The Nazis appropriated many existing symbols and customs, but that doesn't make the entire symbolism or custom automatically "Nazi". Neo-Nazis use Norse mythological symbols too. Other people just like Norse mythology. Context is everything, and the context here is most certainly not one of "a torch march protest". Not everyone who shaves their head is a Nazi skinhead either, nor is everyone who wears army boots.
I wasn't there. Maybe they were talking about the "final solution" for the Jews. I don't think they were, but there is no way for me to know for certain. But lacking any evidence of this, I find such a grave accusation based on such incredibly thin evidence – especially when stated like it's almost a certainty – deeply troubling.
Nazis wear trousers. My boss wears trousers. So my boss must be a Nazi.
Torch walks are not exclusively associated with or invented by the far right. They were adopted by the far right from pre-existing traditions in the regional cultures.
The same person has also given a talk on their conference with the title "OpenBSD supremacy", which seems like an oddly specific choice of words (though it could also be the result of English as a second language).
Even unrelated to Charlottesville torch walks generally have right wing connotations, as it was a traditional show of force by the Nazis. In Germany these days you mostly see them done as right wing rallies. As one data point, here[0] you can see NPD members calling for protest holding torches (during broad daylight).
The torches are used as a symbol - might be nothing, but paired with speaking out against cultural marxism it's more likely to be intentional than it otherwise would be.
I don't know, but I'm not giving them the benefit of the doubt since the mail server is fairly explicit if true.
I looked it up on wikipedia. But it was like learning monads from wikipedia. It's a dense nest of jargon that just leaves me wondering which way is up if I spend more than a few minutes following links.
Strange arguable libel aside, you don’t have to compile your wm or terminal every time you make a change. There are awesomewm (and echinus and spectrwm and Qtile et al.), and
xterm and GNOME Terminal and guake and konsole and xfce terminal and Terminator and Terminology and Tilda and Yakuake and rxvt et al., many al.: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/List_of_applications/Ut....
Setting all those aside, you can configure any decent text editor to run `make` whenever you save, and I dare you to find any combination of patches for any single suckless software (except surf) that takes more than 1000 milliseconds to compile with tcc on a computer you use on a regular basis (should work for any normal desk/laptop from the past decade or two).
Why is it sensible to configure a software in C and having to recompile it every time I make a change? Patching software through diffs is error prone and you basically have to fiddle around with the order as to not accidentally mess up your entire program, it makes the software basically non-extensible in a sane way because there's no interface between extension and core code. The line number limits on code also incentivize spaghetti code. If you want software that sucks less you don't need fewer line numbers, you need good program structure and design.