Was this software once popular in a particular niche? I can see recently had an update, but I'm not clear what market it is appealing to since the readme explicitly states that documentation is sparse.
> Over the 23 year history of mod_blog, I've given up on the notion of anyone other than me using it. There was only one other person who used it for just a few months before deciding blogging wasn't for him and that was way back in 2002. So it was completely by surprise that I recently received a bug report on it.
These paths we take in life for the love or debugging our own code. I mean, I've been building websites with a phenomenally feature-rich system I started rolling myself around 2002 and have rewritten twice since then.(including a blogging module, shopping module, custom form+validation language, themes, and lots of stuff you actually can't get from WordPress like hierarchical inline editing for downstream users). I can build a new desktop+mobile site for a business with it in a couple hours. But no one else has ever even seen the code,
let alone used it. The entire rationale for bugfixing and using it again every time has been that I don't want to be at the mercy of WP or anything else.
[mine is just in PHP and TS, though. OP's choice to do it in c++ is on an entirely different level; I'm good at flipping burgers, that person is a master chef].
some of the code comments are also enjoyable. For example the "Sigh" cracks me up:
/*----------------------------------------------------------------------
; because the code was written using a different IO model (that is, if
; there's no data in the file to begin with, we automatically end up in
; EOF mode, let's trigger EOF. Sigh.
;-----------------------------------------------------------------------*/
Oh this is fun. I'm in the process of building something similar, but I'm splitting it into two parts: the first part is a static site generator and the second is a CGI that implements the micropub spec, which can run the static site generator when it receives new content.
I don't think this is positioned to replace Wordpress, Astro, Hugo, etc by any means.
It is just a barebones framework written as a love letter to the language of C.
If its a loveletter to a language than telling you the language is important because that's its sole reason for existing. Someone probably just took this on as a challenge for fun. It's not designed to be in the next YC cohort.
And for that reason, I enjoyed reading through the code and marveling at the simplicity and power of C. It made me warm and fuzzy. But I'm not going to use it. I might fork it and play with it for fun though.
Oof, as someone who has written hundreds of thousands of lines of C (at least), I'm not sure I'd write it a love letter. Maybe a letter of grudging respect, where I break up with it.
You've fallen for the exact thing I was talking about. This software is written to serve blog websites though a CGI module. I don't even know what a "love-letter to C" is, but this software clearly exists with the intention of someone using it.
Perhaps you are too huffed up on your own farts (whatever that means) to realize this just isn’t for you, but for some reason, is living rent free in your head.
I think you're right, but I think you're getting down-voted because 1: the phrasing was crass, and 2: this is a forum filled with developers, all obsessive with whatever language that they're playing with.
I absolutely agree that it's a red flag generally when something says "This is X, written in Y!" -- to me it's usually a sign that the software project at hand is looking for developers, or it's trying to appeal to developers -- which is usually code for "undocumented, difficult to use, unsupported otherwise." as far as the user themselves are concerned.
It's typical that a piece of software drops the language comments once it reaches a certain size threshold. The scope changes, it's no longer about loving C; it's about capturing market share. If it so happens that it hits market popularity it becomes 'This is X!'.
But.. like you said , I think that it's a sign of something else regarding the project.
I disagree. The downvotes and flags are (in my mind) because the behaviour, both in tone and content, at display leads to utterly boring discussions. I am confident that the user can do better and I expect them to do better when expressing their point of view. Your comment being an excellent example of how one can remain civilised, not poison the discussion, and still get pretty much the same point across.
Who are you to say that I cannot speak passionately? Who are you to expect "better" of me? If you do not like something, you are free to ignore it. If you cannot respond to something level-headedly, then don't. It's not my responsibility to present my opinions in a way you find pleasing.
Like it or not, but you are a part of a community here and there are both implicit and explicit rules that come with it. While I can only speak for myself, clearly you can see that plenty of other members took issue with your behaviour. Maybe they are all in the wrong? Maybe they are not? Maybe the truth lies somewhere in-between? It is ultimately up to us as individuals to decide when we make the decision to partake or not in any community.
Your comment history clearly shows that you have plenty of interesting things to say and contribute. It would (to me) be a pity if you decided to die on this (to me) weird, individualistic, "my way or the highway" hill rather than make minor adjustments. Still, that is, of course, your choice.
Regardless, I will move on to other threads at this point.
Oh come on, you've never done something just for the passion of it? Not trying to earn money or get famous, you just do something because you personally enjoy it with no other motivation than that.
Even if you haven't, a lot of people do stuff purely for their own personal satisfaction. That's what a "love letter to x" is. You just do it for the love.
We are going into a weekend, I challenge you to do something just for the love of it.
Code which achieves nothing is called "boilerplate" and I've yet to find anyone passionate about writing it. The joy of programming, to me at least, is solving problems. Hence code which does not solve problems is not enjoyable.
While I see where you're coming from, I think you're simply not the target audience. Similar to building an espresso machine out of Lego [0], building software doesn't have to only be about practicality for the general user, it can all the same be just for the sake of the art. A mountaineer might say they climbed the mountain because it was there, software can be built for similar reasons, or any hobby really.
I get that, I really do, but the lines are often much more blurred here. If I had a penny for every supposedly useful thing "written in Rust/blazing fast", I would be rich. I think people should be a lot clearer when they write software that isn't really intended to be used. Most of what I see exists in the middle ground, where it is written as though it will not be used, but then put out in to the world as if the author wants people to use it.
This is literally the point of a lot of open source software... Sometimes its "hey i wrote this for me, here it is incase you stumble across it and find it useful". Sometimes it's "hey here's this thing i did that i find cool, y'all wanna work with me to improve it?". Sometimes its "look what I can do here's the code you can too!". Sometimes its even "Do you all think this approach has promise?".
In fact very few open source projects are big and professional like Linux. Most are just things people do out of interest or fun.
I have nothing against people who simply leave their stuff open to the public in case it might be useful. My issue is that a lot of this stuff is presented as something you should use when it really isn't fit for that. I've wasted a good deal of time on such projects, using them for a while before I realise they aren't fit for purpose.
While I think it's often a silly way to advertise, I think "utterly despise" is... caring a bit too much.
Sometimes I might care. In this particular case, it's useful for me to know it's written in C, as that's a sign that I'd never want to use it (the fewer internet-facing things written in C I use, the safer I'll be, in general).
But yes, "$FOO: A $BAR in $LANG" is generally a pretty lame way to advertise your project. Advertise based on what it actually does for me, not on your implementation details.
Both are different languages, and both work in different ways.
The interesting part to me is how the difference to serve the set same features is written.
One is an older language and the other is a older-modern language.
It's the same with mechanics. I would be more interested in watching and learning how an 1949 carousel with a vinyl player in the centre works than a 2024 carousel with an iPhone in the centre.
First of all, the implementation will likely be the same from a technical perspective and differ mainly in that the C code will have more boiler plate. Secondly, did you actually read the source code of this project? I feel like reading a PHP one would be more enjoyable purely because it would be more terse.
I get where you're coming from but this is hacker news, what do you expect? There's alot of people here interested in the technology rather then the "product".
I was watching a video the other day where some welder was skimming over settings on the welding machine and assumed I knew or cared what a vague statement "some mild grade steel" meant when he could have been marketing his cool looking product called "example welds".
I guess you'd call him a "a welder so huffed up on his own farts that he'd forgotten that the stuff he welds might also do something useful in addition to beind made of the metal and tools du jour".
The rest of us would realize it's not targetted at consumers of welded goods, but as a discussion or example for other welders. It's not something to be mad about, it's perfectly reasonable that welders talk to each other about welding, and sometimes weld things for fun or practice or to show off to each other.
In the world of programmers, we like to do the same thing. Most of us work either on something targetted at people who want marketing and handholding about how to use the product or on something so niche and that it's really only useful to other devs (and mostly the only devs its useful for are a small subset from the first group that work at the same company) - and we often charge for that kind of work. When something's on github, there's a high likelihood it was made by a programmer wanting other programmers to see it for one reason or another.
> I get that this is probably some kind of personal project, but I see so much of this nowadays and it really boils my biscuits.
This has been common since the late 90s when I started paying attention to programming things, and people weren't calling it a new trend then...
I would say the difference here is that no one is going to read it and see the code. As much as people fantasise about reading code, few actually do it and those that do are broadly wasting their time.
Your welding example is flawed because because the welder is showing things as examples. He compresses the range of things the tool can do into a useful format and presents that to people, rather than just welding some metal together without commentary. If this project and the techniques used to create it were documented, it might be comparable. A discussion of the solution to a given technical problem can be interesting and would be the equivalent to what the welder when he discusses the capability of his tools.
> I would say the difference here is that no one is going to read it and see the code. As much as people fantasise about reading code, few actually do it and those that do are broadly wasting their time.
You'd be surprised how much this statement is wrong. A lot of people enjoy reading the code of the esoteric projects. Case in point, a bunch of HNers are upvoting this and commenting on it.
It's not for you, fine. You're not interested. Fine. Shrug and move on, instead of writing half a dozen posts to let the world know you personally don't care much for it.
PS: you say it's "wasting their time". I've been in software long enough to know that the people who are good at reading code make some of the best programmers on my teams. Friendly advice: Get good at reading code. Especially when it's clunky, weird and esoteric. It'll go a long way.
Thanks for the insult, but I'm very adept at reading code. You know how I got that way? Not by aimlessly trawling through random projects, but by actually interacting with the source code. Picking a random bug on some open source project and solving it will yield ten times the benefit of just reading that project's source, with the added bonus that you achieve something productive at the end. Reading source code is a fantasy. Something that sounds good but falls flat in practice. Hence my almost certain claim that no one actually does it. I don't, do you?
You sure to spend a lot of time trying to tell other people how to use theirs. Projection maybe? I don't know, but I'd be willing to bet if you stopped looking for insults in freindly replies and railing futily against the existence of things other people find interesting you'd be happer.
Didn't mean to insult you. It's really meant as a friendly advice. I'm sharing experience.
I do read code. A lot. I'm not the only one. I know many people who do. I know people who print source code on paper to read on their bus ride back home.
Hell, I know people who read some of the most complicated source code you can imagine, annotate it, criticize it, and then blog about it[1].
It's very weird that you doubt it. Why would we lie? For karma and upvotes? I'm not sure I understand your point. We're literally in the comment thread of a post aimed at reading code and you're here arguing that we're not?
