by godelski | 2025-09-30 00:56:50+00:00
> when people talk about safety, it does matter in Rust, right?

I'm not sure I would make this about languages. Different languages have different advantages, but there's always a trade-off, right? For example, this `cp` issue is a bit of a problem for the coreutils rewrite[0]. I think you gotta ask the question: what benefit does rewriting in rust provide? Potentially more safety, but also something like coreutils has been heavily investigated for the past few decades. Rewriting also comes with the chance of introducing new bugs. So is it safer? Hard to say, right? Especially since Rust is still new and there's not a lot of major software written in it.

> Everyone says 1k LOC is nothing > Or what is your point?

The point we're trying to make is that lines of code are not the bottleneck. Probably one of the big problems with our industry right now is an over reliance on metrics (KPIs). But what can you measure in coding? Lines? Commits? Tickets? Is any of that meaningful?

I said in another comment[1] that I've spent hours or days to write /one line/ of code, or even partial. Does that mean I was doing a bad job? Was I just slacking off? I think this is something many developers have experienced. Were we all lazy? Dumb?

I'd argue that you can't answer that question from the information alone. Sometimes a single line of code is crazy hard to figure out. If you haven't seen this before, allow me to introduce you to some old coding lore[2]

//When I wrote this, only God and I understood what I was doing //Now, God only knows

The thread has other examples of where people have wasted time trying to understand some "magic". Or maybe you know Carmack's Fast Inverse Square Root Algo[3]. Look at that one. It's 7 LOC (5?) yet those lines are so powerful. That is not the type of code someone writes in a flow state, off the top of their head. That is the type of code you write because you used a profiler[4], found the bottleneck, and optimized the crap out of it. Writing 7 lines takes no time, but I'm sure that code took at least a week to write.

The point here is that it is really hard to measure the quality and effectiveness of a programmer. The context of the problem is not something that can be abstracted away when evaluating them. Unfortunately, this means to evaluate them you also need to be an expert programmer AND have meaningful context to understand the specific problems they are working on. There's not a thing you can do from a spreadsheet. The truth is that if you optimize from the spreadsheet you'll only introduce more Jira tickets. There's a joke that there's 2 types of 10x programmers. The other one is the programmer that introduces 100x the jira tickets while completing them 10x as fast. The problem is that that programmer doesn't see the bigger scope and makes mistakes that leads to new tickets. This might be like your new rockstar junior dev. They fill out tickets but are solving the problems in isolation, not in context of the codebase. This leads to more complexity and bugs later on, but that lag in effect is hard to measure/identify so it is easy to think they are a rockstar but actually a problem.

> I start small, I can review just fine.

Yes, and this is how you should do it. I mentioned Unix Philosophy[5] previously. But the thing is that projects continue. Scope expands. If you want to keep writing small programs and integrate them together then you actually need to think quite carefully about the design and implementation of them (again, see Unix Philosophy).

So the point is that everything is highly context driven. That's what matters. You need nuance and care. It is not easy to say what makes good code or even identify it. So... LGTM

[0] https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues/7092

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45409430

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/184618/what-is-the-best-...

[3] https://betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-quakes-fa...

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45060059

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44416817

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45060059

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy