{"id":"c3147dea-f9b7-4519-af32-b778ecac7129","shortId":"ra5tBe","kind":"skill","title":"philosophy","tagline":"Suckless philosophy and manifest for building simple, minimal, maintainable software with a focus on clarity and frugality.","description":"Philosophy\n==========\nWe are the home of quality software with a focus on simplicity, clarity and\nfrugality. Our philosophy is about keeping things simple, minimal and usable.\nWe believe this should become the mainstream philosophy in the IT sector.\nUnfortunately, the tendency for complex, error-prone and slow software seems to\nbe prevalent in the present-day software industry. We intend to prove the\nopposite with our software projects.\n\nOur project focuses on advanced and experienced computer users. In contrast\nwith the usual proprietary software world or many mainstream open source\nprojects that focus more on average and non-technical end users, we think that\nexperienced users are mostly ignored. This is particularly true for user\ninterfaces, such as graphical environments on desktop computers, on mobile\ndevices, and in so-called Web applications. We believe that the market of\nexperienced users is growing continuously, with each user looking for more\nappropriate solutions for his/her work style.\n\nDesigning simple and elegant software is far more difficult than letting ad-hoc\nor over-ambitious features obscure the code over time. However one has to pay\nthis price to achieve reliability and maintainability. Furthermore, minimalism\nresults in reasonable and attainable goals. We strive to maintain minimalism\nand clarity to drive development to completion.\n\nManifest\n--------\nMany (open source) hackers are proud if they achieve large amounts of code,\nbecause they believe the more lines of code they've written, the more progress\nthey have made. The more progress they have made, the more skilled they are.\nThis is simply a delusion.\n\nMost hackers actually don't care much about code quality. Thus, if they get\nsomething working which seems to solve a problem, they stick with it. If this\nkind of software development is applied to the same source code throughout its\nentire life-cycle, we're left with large amounts of code, a totally screwed\ncode structure, and a flawed system design. This is because of a lack of\nconceptual clarity and integrity in the development process.\n\nCode complexity is the mother of bloated, hard to use, and totally inconsistent\nsoftware. With complex code, problems are solved in suboptimal ways, valuable\nresources are endlessly tied up, performance slows to a halt, and\nvulnerabilities become a commonplace. The only solution is to scrap the entire\nproject and rewrite it from scratch.\n\nThe bad news: quality rewrites rarely happen, because hackers are proud of\nlarge amounts of code. They think they understand the complexity in the code,\nthus there's no need to rewrite it. They think of themselves as masterminds,\nunderstanding what others can never hope to grasp. To these types, complex\nsoftware is the ideal.\n\nIngenious ideas are simple. Ingenious software is simple. Simplicity is the\nheart of the Unix philosophy. The more code lines you have removed, the more\nprogress you have made. As the number of lines of code in your software\nshrinks, the more skilled you have become and the less your software sucks.\n\nRelated links\n-------------\n* [The Duct Tape Programmer](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/09/23.html)\n* [Why should I have written ZeroMQ in C, not C++](http://www.250bpm.com/blog:4)\n* [Best practices in application architecture: Use layers to decouple](http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341d3df553ef014e5f920093970c-pi)\n* [Facebook's code quality problem](http://www.darkcoding.net/software/facebooks-code-quality-problem/)\n* [Minimal Viable Programs](http://joearms.github.io/published/2014-06-25-minimal-viable-program.html)\n* [Why I Write Games in C](http://jonathanwhiting.com/writing/blog/games_in_c/)\n* [Use of command-line tools for effective data processing](https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-than-your-hadoop-cluster.html)","tags":["philosophy","suckless","agent","skills","fuwn","agent-skills","bitreich"],"capabilities":["skill","source-fuwn","skill-philosophy","topic-agent-skills","topic-bitreich","topic-skills","topic-suckless"],"categories":["suckless-agent-skills"],"synonyms":[],"warnings":[],"endpointUrl":"https://skills.sh/Fuwn/suckless-agent-skills/philosophy","protocol":"skill","transport":"skills-sh","auth":{"type":"none","details":{"cli":"npx skills add Fuwn/suckless-agent-skills","source_repo":"https://github.com/Fuwn/suckless-agent-skills","install_from":"skills.sh"}},"qualityScore":"0.459","qualityRationale":"deterministic score 0.46 from registry signals: · indexed on github topic:agent-skills · 18 github stars · SKILL.md body (3,843 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