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points by jjkaczor 3 days ago | 0 comments

This - 100%.

Just take a look at some of the opensource academic, infrastructure or "passion-projects", where there is no management pressures to "move fast & break-things" and ship-ship-ship. They tend to be very stable, very predictable - and very high quality.

[–] wolvesechoes 3 days ago

> They tend to be very stable, very predictable - and very high quality.

Some of them are, most are not.

Actually, most FOSS stuff is anything but stable or predictable. Instead it is constant treadmill, broken compatibility, and recently, thousand of commits from claude et al.

[–] jjkaczor 1 day ago

I did say: "some" - you are correct about "most" (chasing the latest "shiny" pattern, method, infrastructure, etc - constant churn)

[–] SoftTalker 3 days ago

Care to name any?

I've seen software that academics write. It's no better than average. It's often cut-and-paste code, or these days AI slop. Software is a means to an end in academia, rarely a product in itself.

[–] dotancohen 3 days ago

Anki

[–] dboreham 3 days ago

TeX

[–] macintux 3 days ago

I don't think we can rationally extrapolate anything from Knuth's career. His entirely CS presence is a pursuit of perfection unlike, well, anyone.

[–] jjkaczor 3 days ago

You read my mind...