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?
Ed. It’s the standard text editor.
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?
Personally I prefer MPV but yeah both just wrap around FFMPEG
It’s worth noting that most commercial multimedia software is also more or less a wrapper around ffmpeg
Honestly, it all starts going to shite after “hello world.”
Shouldn’t it be “Hello world.”?
No. “Hello, world!” or you’re doing it wrong.
What does perfect hello world even mean? It can be realized in many ways and none is the best way.
Computers can’t even greet you in the real world. Its like some kind of sick joke.
“Dance, clanker! Dance!”
Hahahahah
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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”.
It’s on Github and has several PRs.
TeX?
Development is considered to be complete, and the version numbering is just adding a digit of pi. Last change was 5 years ago.
Automotive engine control computers.
They just work, for decades and millions of miles.
You may be interested by this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_verification.
Prominent examples of verified software systems include the CompCert verified C compiler and the seL4 high-assurance operating system kernel.
There was a moment in time where maybe it was qmail:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qmail
Ten years after the launch of qmail 1.0, and at a time when more than a million of the Internet’s SMTP servers ran either qmail or netqmail, only four known bugs had been found in the qmail 1.0 releases, and no security issues.
More on how it was accomplished:
https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/01/17/some-thoughts-on-security-after-ten-years-of-qmail-1-0/
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
No; since every user defines the perfect program differently. Which should be the default behaviour(s)?
You cannot criticize a good knife by asking why it’s not a hammer.
But I can critisize it for having only one sharp edge instead of 2. Or for being too short or too long. Or for having a handle that’s not shaped well for my hand. (That last metaphor is probably the correct one for the sentiment I’m going for.)
The answer remains, this tool is not flawed, it’s just not the one you want.
Vim could be feature-complete and formally verified and I’m still using Xed.
A hammer is a completely different tool, but different defaults in a single program are not.
Point is there’s no objective standard for “perfect”
Software is always an ongoing conversation.
Of course: https://github.com/kelseyhightower/nocode
Ha. I still have an open PR on that.
Perfect code right here:
TeX. Best documented source, and last bug found was 12 years ago.
The 2021 release of Tex included several bug-fixes, so not quite 12 years:
https://tug.org/texmfbug/tuneup21bugs.html
See also the following list of potential bugs, that may be included in the planned 2029 release of Tex:
https://tug.org/texmfbug/newbug.html
That said, Tex is still an impressive piece of software
Thanks for the update, I somehow missed that.
To be honest, they didn’t make it easy to find
TempleOS
The dev of left-pad made it perfect by removing it.
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.
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.
pwdseems simple enough.cdI 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 alternativecdtools 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.
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.
