This is my response to Rob Pike’s words On Bloat.

I’m not surprised to see this from Pike. He’s a NIH extremist. And yes, in this aspect he’s my spirit animal when coding for fun. I’ll avoid using a framework or a dependency because it’s not the way that I would have done it, and it doesn’t do it quite right… for me.

And he correctly recognizes the technical debt that an added dependency involves.

But I would say that he has two big blind spots.

  1. He doesn’t recognize that not using the available dependency is also adding huge technical debt. Every line of code you write is code that you have to maintain, forever.

  2. The option for most software isn’t “use the dependency” vs “implement it yourself”. It’s “use the dependency” vs “don’t do it at all”. If the latter means adding 10 human years to the product, then most of the time the trade-off makes it not worth doing at all.

He shows a dependency graph of Kubernetes. Great. So are you going to write your own Kubernetes now?

Pike is a good enough coder that he can write his own editor (wikipedia: “Pike has written many text editors”). So am I. I don’t need dependencies to satisfy my own requirements.

But it’s quite different if you need to make a website that suddenly needs ADA support, and now the EU forces a certain cookie behavior, and designers (in collaboration with lawyers) mandate a certain layout of the cookie consent screen, and the third party ad network requires some integration.

And then you’re told that the database needs to be run by the database team, because there’s FIPS certification aspects that you absolutely don’t have time to work on, and data residency requirements with third party auditability feature demands (not requests).

What are you going to do? Demand funding for 100 SWE years to implement it yourself? And in the mean time, just not be able to advertise during BFCM? Not launch the product for 10 years? Just live with the fact that no customer can reach your site if they use Opera on mobile?

So yeah. The website is bloated.

I feel like Pike is saying “yours is the slowest website that I ever regularly use”, to which the answer is “yeah, but you do use it regularly”. If the site hadn’t launched, then you wouldn’t be able to even choose to use it.

And comparing to the 70s. Please. Come on. If you ask a “modern coder” to solve a “1970s problem”, it’s not going to be slow, is it? They could write it in Python and it wouldn’t even be a remotely fair fight.

Software is slower today not because the problems are more complex in terms of compute (yet they very very very much are), but because the compute capacity of today simply affords wasting it, in order that we are now able to solve complex problems.

Ironically, a lot of slow bloated websites (notably banks and airlines) run on mainframes with code written in… the 1970s! When supposedly men were men, and code was fast? That part we could fix. Just give me 10,000 programmer years, and I’ll have us back to square 1, except a little bit faster.

People do things because there’s a perceived demand for it. If the demand is “I just like coding”, then as long as you keep coding there’s no failure.

Pike’s technical legacy has very visible scars from these blind spots of his.