The Lindy effect in software

https://www.clemsau.com/posts/the-lindy-effect-in-software/

by ankitg12 • 15 days ago

35 41 15 days ago

Chu4eeno• 12 days ago

I'd say rust is the new Java, not Go.

Complete with rewriting everything in the trendy memory safe quasi-portable language that is faster than (poorly written) C in your personal microbenchmarks.

rf152• 12 days ago

I work in enterprise, and java still reigns supreme. You see some (very limited) cracks coming from other jvm languages, but that's all. Nobody talks about Rust, rarely about C.

bee_rider• 12 days ago

Which enterprise?

All the job postings I see are for C++ (Annoyingly. Fortran is better). Or Python obviously.

onesandofgrain2• 12 days ago

Isn't .NET kinda on quite a rise in enterprise?

LoganDark• 12 days ago

Huh? Rust is nothing like Java. Java is a dynamic type-erased garbage-collected managed abomination with FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition standard library.

slopinthebag3• 12 days ago

People have been rewriting software in better languages ever since there was more than one programming language. Eventually people will be rewriting Rust programs in GoombaLang or whatever. Isn't this what we want?

uecker4• 12 days ago

I don't think this is what we want. We want people to maintain and incrementally improve existing software and tooling and not rewrite and change things all the time.

procaryote• 12 days ago

The point of the article is pretty much that you can pick stable technology instead of joining the treadmill of rewriting in whatever the new thing is. When people are rewriting rust programs in GoombaLang, C will still be around. When people rewrite GoombaLang into SmurfLang, C will still be around, etc

pjmlp3• 12 days ago

None of them are nowhere near the Java tooling and ecosystem.

We only touch Go due to containers tooling, and Rust only due to the RIR stuff from Python and JavaScript.

Enterprise consulting is staying with Java, .NET, JavaScript/Typescript, Python, Powershell, SQL, and co.

Naturally Swift and Kotlin if doing mobile without Cordova, React Native and friends.

C or C++ for native libraries, as those are what SDKs support out of the box without additional tooling.

Boring technology for the most part, and usually a few versions behind stuck in some LTS.

cadamsdotcom• 12 days ago

(2023 - hopefully the post lasts another 100 years!)

Animats• 12 days ago

Two words: Visual Basic.

mrkeen• 12 days ago

Terrific writing. Just terrific. Copied verbatim:

  The Lindy effect in software The longer a tech has been around, the more robust it is seen as compared to more recent ones, we often talk about a technology’s maturity The C language SQL has been around for a while, https://antonz.org/fancy-ql/ JS libraries seem to come and goes

karmakurtisaani• 12 days ago

I somehow missed the sarcasm and went to read the article. Was a bit confused for a minute there..

armchairhacker• 12 days ago

Still better than AI, it has personality and not paragraphs of empty prose

pillmillipedes• 12 days ago

you might be confused as to what terrific means

Heloseaa• 3 days ago

I just realized my article was shared on HN (wasn't aware of the visite spike until 7 days later).

Will work on the writing, I truly agree that my writing isn't the best. Thanks for pointing it out.

jdw64• 12 days ago

The Lindy effect is ultimately a kind of momentum. If that's the case, it seems like it's not the language itself, but rather the 'contracts,' 'interfaces,' and 'standards' that survive longer than the specific implementations a language provides.

Looking at the examples of Lindy that the OP mentioned, they're mostly at the infrastructure level. That's probably because many systems have been built on top of them, and the cost of replacing them is high.

On the flip side, things with weak Lindy effects are likely frontend frameworks or specific libraries. CSS methodologies are a good example of that.

In other words, the deeper something is, the harder it is to change, and as long as that deep language and its ecosystem aren't replaced, it will persist. As a counterexample, Fortran comes to mind—it's still being used today. Fortran has also evolved to exist beneath NumPy and Julia.

Ultimately, I think the core isn't the Lindy effect itself, but rather how many people you can attract commercially, and how many jobs you can create based on that.

In that sense, I think the next-generation language will succeed when it's used to build new infrastructure, and when the cost of refactoring becomes exponentially high. Right now, something that's growing similarly strong is CUDA. Personally, I'm always waiting to see what that language will be.

simianwords3• 12 days ago

If we had followed this more seriously in the past, we would have still stuck on to writing C for enterprise applications and had way too many memory bugs. Aren’t we glad there was a demographic who said no to C and brought the revolutionary idea to use Java instead?

Couldn’t a Lindy enthusiast have gone “umm but isn’t Java too new and shouldn’t we just stick to C which is well trodden and understood??”

It’s easy to write sloganeering articles. But it doesn’t tell me anything specific.

Invoking Lindy is just bias to status quo. I prefer bias to progress but respecting chestertons fence.

mansa102• 12 days ago

I think the Lindy effect is less about making strong arguments about which tool to use in debates, and more about calling out and explaining a real life phenomenon.

I've invoked it in my job mostly to explain to younger developers why learning vim keybindings+terminal git usage while they have the most plasticity is most likely going to be a good bet for the remainder of their career, as editors, operating systems and associated keybindings & UI will change around them much more often than those fundamentals.

It's not a guarantee, and i wouldn't bet my entire business on the Lindy effect, but it is worth reflecting on it as an explanation of something that is paradoxical or not obvious.

simianwords3• 12 days ago

I agree and the article uses Lindy not in descriptive but prescriptive level.

For prescriptive, I would use Chesterton's Fence https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/

orf• 12 days ago

I've invoked it in my job mostly to explain to younger developers why learning vim keybindings+terminal git usage

Interesting - I see it as the opposite: learning the git CLI is pointless. It’s slow, clunky and it doesn’t teach you any of the very interesting inner-workings of Git.

There are much better things to spend time learning, especially if your editor has a native git integration.

thunderbong2• 11 days ago

This article from yesterday -

Good Tools Are Invisible

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48858121

In my opinion, software tools are different from software libraries.

Knowing RDBMS concepts and SQL is one thing, vim and git are something else altogether.

devnonymous• 12 days ago

Couldn’t a Lindy enthusiast have gone “umm but isn’t Java too new and shouldn’t we just stick to C which is well trodden and understood??”

I think people often misrepresent history because they view it with the benefit of hindsight. People who chose to use Java didn't do it to embrace a revolutionary idea, they were embracing an evolutionary one. It seemed like a natural optimization step, rather than a clean slate.

Most Jave devs were proficient C devs who found the idea of a platform independent C quite appealing.

That's the Lindy effect. C (the essence of it) survives in Java and right up to JS/python/go.

In contrast consider Pascal, Fotran, Perl, COBOL, (and dare I say ... Lisp ?)

t0mpr1c3• 10 days ago

Clojure is Lisp, Guile is Lisp, Racket is Lisp, R and Julia have Lisp under the hood; but the spirit of Lisp also lives on in Javascript, Ruby, Rust, and every functional programming language ever, plus all the languages that incorporated functional features including Python, Perl, and Go, and languages that didn't until they did, like C++ and Java. And Emacs.

thunderbong2• 12 days ago

A lot of the article is extremely useful for people creating software libraries, IMHO.

Under the section -

"Applying the Lindy effect to software engineering"

The suggestions are -

- Prudent Adoption

- Stick to Proven Foundation

- Plan for Longevity

- Embrace Evolution, Not Revolution

simianwords3• 11 days ago

This is just conservatism from first principles. Why doesn’t it apply to sociology? LGBTQ, equality rights and so on? Lot more at stake.

legulere• 12 days ago

I really like the concept of novelty budget: keep most parts boring and use new stuff only where you can gain an advantage from it.

The Lindy effect in software

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