But in this case it's not an atrocity, and whether or not it was even a bad choice (at the time or today) is debatable. It's fine to present an opinion you hold about something, but belittling that thing also tends to implicitly belittle the intellect of people who might agree with that thing, not to mention the people who designed and built that thing.
> But if you can't even attack...
Why do we need to attack something? If we can't explain and support our view that something is wrong or a bad decision without resorting to attacks, perhaps our argument isn't really that strong?
And that's the thing. I don't think the author really presented a strong argument; he tried to convince me by verbally trashing the other side, while the actual logical, coherent argument is buried in a sea of disdain. I think it's still not clear what the default should be. Do we optimize for performance, or for debugability and tinkerability? I mean, I feel like that's one of the classic debates that we still -- and will probably never -- have no hard answer for.
Edited to add: I went back and read the linked Python bug tracker issue[0], which honestly I wish was what HN linked to. It's concise, explains the problem, explains why LD_PRELOAD isn't all that useful for libpython, specifically why this sort of performance degradation is even worse with a library like libpython, and makes sure to call out that this change only affects libpython and not any other shared libraries, where (implicitly) people might find LD_PRELOAD useful.
>Why do we need to attack something? If we can't explain and support our view that something is wrong or a bad decision without resorting to attacks, perhaps our argument isn't really that strong?
It's rather the opposite: if we don't resort to attack, comdent the practice, raise the tone, our argument will be weak.
That's because it's not enough to be right. It also need to be memorable and resontant. Else people's eye will just glaze over it.
That's why this post has 218 comments as of now, and you where involved and will remember it better tomorrow, than some purely technical explanation that probably wouldn't even have made it in the first page (or have 0-10 comments, typical of such posts).
> But if you can't even attack...
Why do we need to attack something? If we can't explain and support our view that something is wrong or a bad decision without resorting to attacks, perhaps our argument isn't really that strong?
And that's the thing. I don't think the author really presented a strong argument; he tried to convince me by verbally trashing the other side, while the actual logical, coherent argument is buried in a sea of disdain. I think it's still not clear what the default should be. Do we optimize for performance, or for debugability and tinkerability? I mean, I feel like that's one of the classic debates that we still -- and will probably never -- have no hard answer for.
Edited to add: I went back and read the linked Python bug tracker issue[0], which honestly I wish was what HN linked to. It's concise, explains the problem, explains why LD_PRELOAD isn't all that useful for libpython, specifically why this sort of performance degradation is even worse with a library like libpython, and makes sure to call out that this change only affects libpython and not any other shared libraries, where (implicitly) people might find LD_PRELOAD useful.
[0] https://bugs.python.org/issue38980