this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2026
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Programmer Humor

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It will happen to you (programming.dev)
submitted 2 days ago by sus@programming.dev to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 73 points 2 days ago (4 children)

It's the configuration complexity clock.

You hardcode values in an established, full-featured programming language.

That gets annoying, so you push some into config files.

That's not powerful enough, so you let the config files include conditionals.

Soon your config files are more like scripts, but it's so easy to keep adding features...

And suddenly you're back to hardcoding, but in a newer, jankier programming language.

[–] HeHoXa@lemmy.zip 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's not powerful enough, so you let the config files include conditionals.

NOPE! Nope. That's the too far point. Abort. Abandon ship. Start over.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] HeHoXa@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Grug make thinky box do good.

Grug too dumb to understand impossible.

Peers say server too weak for search. Grug write custom search. Customer happy. Boss happy. Peers say it fail edge case. Grug shrug.

Peers say web app can't use CLI tool. Grug make extension. Customers happy. Boss happy. Peers say that cheating. Grug too dumb for rules.

Grug code small. Get used lots. Peers code big. Argue about reviews. Never get deployed.

Grug strongest there is

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

"Grug too dumb for rules" is legitimately good programming advice.

[–] HeHoXa@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago

Only sort of related but this reminded me of something that struck me recently:

A great benefit of being dumb is never knowing something was too obvious to be worth logic

Often in comedies, there will be a scene where the dummy helps the genius reach some epiphany just by applying simple reasoning to a point the genius glossed over

I think this is pretty realistic

[–] lime@feddit.nu 11 points 2 days ago

i prefer referring to greenspun's tenth

[–] somegeek@programming.dev 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

So this is exactly talking about Nix, Guix, chezmoi?

[–] zaubentrucker@sopuli.xyz 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Don't know about chezmoi, but Nix and Guix use a proper programming language that is also suited as a configuration file format, no?

So they're at noon and might just stay there

[–] lime@feddit.nu 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

guix yeah, since they picked a pre-existing one. nix the language is arguably an overgrown dsl which explaits why it's... real weird.

[–] zaubentrucker@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 days ago

I guess nix started at noon of the next day lol

[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 5 points 2 days ago

That’s excellent. I think the initial momentum towards a DSL is basically equivalent to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect