Spyke
programming·Programmingbyfortnitefinn

Are there any examples of 'perfect' software?

I'm talking about programs that can't be improved no matter what. They do exactly what they're supposed to and will never be changed.

It'll probably have to be something small, like cd or pwd, but does such a program exist?

View original on sh.itjust.works
71
Comments99
thingsiplayreply
lemmy.ml

What does perfect hello world even mean? It can be realized in many ways and none is the best way.

1
degenreply
midwest.social

Computers can't even greet you in the real world. Its like some kind of sick joke.

"Dance, clanker! Dance!"

3
Dave.reply
aussie.zone

It was fault tolerant but I wouldn't say it was perfect. There were plenty of "known issues", and the fix in production was basically, "don't do that".

12
Onomatopoeia
lemmy.cafe

Automotive engine control computers.

They just work, for decades and millions of miles.

36
kalpolreply
lemmy.ca

Djbdns was excellent too, and ezmlm,.in fact all DJB's software was quality for its single purpose. The world moved on though, and you had to have your basic Internet servers just...do more

3
bleistift2
sopuli.xyz

No; since every user defines the perfect program differently. Which should be the default behaviour(s)?

26
VitoRobles
lemmy.today

I wanted to say VLC because to me, it's the gold standard of fully working open-source software that just destroys the commercial competitors.

But it's not perfect only because society changes. New video formats forces VLC and open-source devs to adapt. Bigger video and new tech specs require VLC to update. If it wasn't for all those external needs, VLC would be perfect.

Did I also mentioned the many times rich companies wanted to buy VLC and they laughed?

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luridnessreply
lemmy.ml

Personally I prefer MPV but yeah both just wrap around FFMPEG

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WolfLinkreply
sh.itjust.works

It’s worth noting that most commercial multimedia software is also more or less a wrapper around ffmpeg

3
kibiz0r
midwest.social

Is there a perfect building?

Probably not, since they exist in an environment — which is constantly changing — and are used by people — whose needs are constantly changing.

The same is true of software. Yes, programs consist of math which has objective qualities. But in order to execute in the physical world, they have to make certain assumptions which can always be invalidated.

Consider fast inverse sqrt: maybe perfect, for the time, for specific uses, on specific hardware? Probably not perfect for today.

16
L0rdMathias
sh.itjust.works

Notepad.exe, pre-windows 11. Now it's something else entirely but still uses the name :(

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FizzyOrangereply
programming.dev

Nah it was eternally annoying that it didn't support Unix line endings. Also there are clearly a ton of basic features that people want from lightweight text editors.

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Treczoks
lemmy.world

TeX. Best documented source, and last bug found was 12 years ago.

14
Blackmist
feddit.uk

TeX?

Development is considered to be complete, and the version numbering is just adding a digit of pi. Last change was 5 years ago.

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ehxorreply
lemmy.ca

This was going to be my point. The idea that as the software slowly makes new releases the version number more and more closely approximates Pi

2
FizzyOrange
programming.dev

Yeah you probably can't do to much more to pwd or yes or whatever (yeah I know about the silly optimisations). I think once you get much beyond that there are always more features you can add. Even for something like cd, people have made fancier versions with fuzzy matching and so on.

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Eager Eaglereply
lemmy.world

ugh, no way. It might do a fine job with typesetting, but the user experience is utterly awful and that's very unlikely to change because of design choices over 40+ years. If you don't think so, give typst a real try.

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carmo55reply
lemmy.zip

Semantic round brackets make typst impossible to use for me. If it had curlies instead it would be great.

1
SinTan1729reply
programming.dev

Not sure about LaTeX, but TeX is widely considered to be almost "perfect" code.

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gruereply
lemmy.world

TeX will be perfect after Knuth dies and the version number is incremented to π.

2
thingsiplay
lemmy.ml

I don't think such thing as perfect software exist, only abandoned software. If the environment changes, then the software needs changes too.

7
mushroommunk
lemmy.today

I would have said Windows notepad but they screwed the pooch on that one and changed it.

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iegodreply
lemmy.zip

They recently experienced an self-update hijack. Plenty of room for improvement.

7
BlameThePeacockreply
lemmy.ca

That was a server side compromise, but the update function could have detected it with more security features so you're still right.

4
Kissaki
programming.dev

For software to be perfect, can not be improved no matter what, you'd have to define a very specific and narrow scope and evaluate against that.

Environments change, text and data encoding and content changes, forms and protocol of input and output changes, opportunities and wishes to integrate or extend change.

pwd seems simple enough. cd I would already say no, with opportunities to remember folders, support globbing, fuzzy matching, history, virtual filesystems. Many of those depend on the environment you're in. Typically, shells handle globbing. There's alternative cd tools that do fuzzy matching and history, and virtual filesystems are usually abstracted away. But things change. And I would certainly like an interactive and fuzzy cd.

Now, if you define it's scope, you can say: "All that other stuff is out of scope. It's perfect within it's defined target scope." But I don't know if that's what you're looking for? It certainly doesn't mean it can't be improved no matter what.

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ne0phytereply
feddit.org

If you just need the functionality then fzf does (among other things) exactly that. Interactive fuzzy cd. If you use the shell bindings you can do cd foo/bar/**<tab> to get a recursive fuzzy matching or you can do alt+c to immediately find any subdirectory and directly cd into it upon pressing enter. You can also use Ctrl+T to find and insert a path into the prompt.

3
Kissakireply
programming.dev

Thanks for the suggestion. As a first step, I set it up in Nushell with a ctrl+t shortcut:

$env.config.keybindings = (
    $env.config.keybindings | append {
        name: fzf_file_picker
        modifier: control
        keycode: char_t
        mode: [emacs, vi_insert, vi_normal]
        event: {
            send: ExecuteHostCommand
            cmd: "commandline edit --insert (fzf | str trim)"
        }
    }
)

Maybe I will look into more. :) I've known about fzf but I guess never gotten around to fully evaluating and integrating it.

Nushell supports fuzzy completions, globbing, and "menus" (TUI) natively. Still, the TUI aspect and possibly other forms of integrations seem like they could be worthwhile or useful as extensions.

1
whotookkarl
lemmy.dbzer0.com

Pretty subjective but if you're looking for do one thing and do it well I'd go with some of the GNU core utils like you mentioned, vlc & ffmpeg for AV media, and sl for being a silly way to handle ls typos

5
Kissakireply
programming.dev

…that supports Unicode? Which encodings? Or only ASCII? Unicode continues to change.

I wouldn't be very confident that it won't change or offer reasonable opportunities for improvement.

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Kissakireply
programming.dev

Your sentence abruptly ends in a backtick - did you mean to include something more? Maybe “wc”?

3
KindaABigDyl
programming.dev

Nope.

I've thought about this before, and it gave me an interesting thought process: AI can't ever be good at doing a large project.

It has a hard limit. Not only is it not as good as us, the best it can ever do is as good as us, and we're not even good at it. That's all it can be trained on! Our garbage code lol

4
lemmydividebyzero
reddthat.com

Windows event viewer... You open it, go to the toilet, to the shower, take a coffee, ... and only 2 more minutes later, it shows you the entries...

It's so perfect, they never had to improve it in decades.

/s

4
kryptonianCodeMonkey
lemmy.world

Depends on your definition of "perfect" and "improved". Is it perfect because it does one fundamental thing really well? Is it improved by adding new features?

I think what you're meaning is, is there a program that is ubiquitous (or at least works anywhere), will basically remain used forever because it does a fundamental job that will always need to be done, and it does that job in the most straightforward way possible that can't be made any algorithmically simpler, faster, etc. Probably plenty, honestly. Bitwise operations, arithmetic, fetch/store, etc. Though ubiquity/working anywhere gets rarer the higher you go from hardware. Even your suggestion of cd, for example, has to interface with an OS's file system, of which there are several common types. What it's doing is simple in concept, but will always be dependent on other programs for the file system.

4
BrightCandle
lemmy.world

Pretty certain cd and pwd have changed over the years. The kernel hasn't remained the same so the commands that use it wont and now we have faster methods to do various things like getting file data the commands that depend on it will change. Less quickly than something that is still gaining features but bit rot is a very real effect since every single part of software is in constant flux.

3
oyo
lemmy.zip

mcmaster.com is pretty close...

3
Kissakireply
programming.dev

Do you exclude inventory management from that "will never change" so that that's only about software?

I imagine there will be new products to be listed.

1
ellen
piefed.social

Winamp! It probably had some bugs or security issues but functional it was perfect imo.

3
Alavi
programming.dev

I would say git, tex, sqlite, Clojure, Steel banks common lisp are some of the candidates.

Perfect doesn't meen "not any bugs fixes or features needed" to me. I can't really define what it means to me...

3
VitoRoblesreply
lemmy.today

Didn't IRC have major insecurity issues?

I can't remember why IRC died.

1
Kissakireply
programming.dev

The original one? Because there's numerous extensions to it. I wouldn't be confident it won't evolve further.

1
irelephant [he/him]reply
lemmy.dbzer0.com

Ehhh, for curl there is a few features they're working on (like better websocket support), and I'm sure there's lots of optimizations that could be made, given how complex a project it is..

2
padreati
lemmy.zip

Some time ago I used haproxy, a software load balancer. I remember that I found an issue which was that it could start with an empty configuration or something similar. When I reached the owner repo it was stated that there were found nu bugs for years of heavy use.

1
SlIdE42
jlai.lu

Ericsson's AXD 301 has achieved a NINE nines reliability (yes, you read that right, 99.9999999%)!

1
Sephtis
lemmy.world

Many might disagree, but imo vim is the perfect text editor for a command line interface. It's just so simpel and does exactly what I need it to do without doing anything unnecessary

0
Sivecanoreply
lemmy.dbzer0.com

Vim has some pretty messy design... Starting at some of the action quirks and ending at vim9script

8
Sephtisreply
lemmy.world

Never heard of vim9script, what is it. I must admit I don't use it for a lot of super complicated tasks just regular yaml and file editing. At for that it's perfect imo

-1
Sivecanoreply
lemmy.dbzer0.com

Vim9-script is a bespoke DSL introduced in vim 9 which was to replace vimscript (the old config language) It was recieved as a bit wacky with its support for classes among other things.

2
karlhungusreply
lemmy.ca

neovim is a drop in replacement for vim that fixes the issues that bother me with vim

4
Sephtisreply
lemmy.world

Might install that then in the future, if I remember it. Sudo apt-get install vim is just so ingrained in muscle memory

-1
whoreply
feddit.org

Nit: vim is a visual editor. It has a text interface, but it's not a command line interface.

An example of a command line text editor would be sed.

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Sephtisreply
lemmy.world

I know it isn't a cli but a text editor that you can use in a terminal, if there's any other difference i got wrong feel free to correct me

0