Software, practices, and technologies I consider harmful.
The status indicator reflects the current state of the work: - Abandoned: Work that has been discontinued - Notes: Initial collections of thoughts and references - Draft: Early structured version with a central thesis - In Progress: Well-developed work actively being refined - Finished: Completed work with no planned major changes This helps readers understand the maturity and completeness of the content.
The confidence tag expresses how well-supported the content is, or how likely its overall ideas are right. This uses a scale from "impossible" to "certain", based on the Kesselman List of Estimative Words: 1. "certain" 2. "highly likely" 3. "likely" 4. "possible" 5. "unlikely" 6. "highly unlikely" 7. "remote" 8. "impossible" Even ideas that seem unlikely may be worth exploring if their potential impact is significant enough.
The importance rating distinguishes between trivial topics and those which might change your life. Using a scale from 0-10, content is ranked based on its potential impact on: - the reader - the intended audience - the world at large For example, topics about fundamental research or transformative technologies would rank 9-10, while personal reflections or minor experiments might rank 0-1.
"And folks, let's be honest. Sturgeon was an optimist. Way more than 90% of code is crap." -- Al Viro
"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." -- C.A.R. Hoare, The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture
"One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code." -- Ken Thompson
"..At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way -- and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay." -- C.A.R. Hoare
"It's a curious thing about our industry: not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we also don't learn from our successes." -- Keith Braithwaite
| Harmful | Less harmful |
|---|---|
| SGML, XML, YAML. | JSON, CSV, ndb(6), plain (UTF-8) text. |
| NFS, SMB, AFS, WebDAV. | 9p. |
| C++, Java, Vala, D, Python, Ruby. | C, Go, Limbo. |
| pthreads (POSIX threads). | CSP-style concurrency: Go, libthread, libtask, Limbo, Erlang, ... |
| Perl, Ruby. | rc, awk. |
| PCRE | Structural Regular Expressions or plain classic/extended regexps (as used in awk, sed, grep, etc.). |
| Bash, tcsh, zsh. | rc, OpenBSD's pdksh, ash/dash. |
| GNU Coreutils. | Plan 9 from User Space. |
| GNU Screen. | tmux. |
| GNU info. | Man pages. |
| GCC. | 8c, tcc. |
| glibc. | musl, ucLibc, DietLibc. |
| GNU autoconf/automake, CMake, imake, scons, waf. | mk, or plain old portable makefiles. |
| Glib. | libc (see above), p9p's C libraries. |
| GTK, Qt, VxWindows. | Tk, textual interfaces. |
| Vim, Emacs, nano, Eclipse, ... | Acme, Sam, ed. |
| UTF-16, UTF-32, Latin-1, other encodings. | UTF-8. |
| iSCSI, FCoE. | AoE (ATA over Ethernet). |
| PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules). | Factotum. |
| Jabber and XMPP. | IRC (for IM), STOMP (for general distributed messaging). |
| IMAP. | SMAP (Simple Mail Access Protocol). |
| SQL databases. | Tutorial D, pq, BigTable, plain old hierarchical filesystems. |
| Subversion, aka svn. | Git, Mercurial (aka hg); hell, even CVS or plain old tarballs would be better than svn. |
| FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris. | OpenBSD. |
| Apache, lighttpd. | thttpd, OpenBSD's fork of apache 1.3, nginx, or best of all: don't use HTTP. |
| SVG | PS (PostScript) |
| PS (PostScript), DjVu. | |
| EPUB | DjVu. |
| ALSA | OSS4 |
| GPL, LGPL, Apache Software License, MPL, CC. | ISC, MIT/X, BSD, CC0, public domain. |
| head | sed 11q |
| Harmful | Less harmful |
|---|
| Harmful | Less harmful |
|---|
| Harmful | Less harmful |
|---|
| Harmful | Less harmful |
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| Harmful | Less harmful |
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Yotam, Kris. (Apr 2026). Harmful. krisyotam.com. https://krisyotam.com/blog/technology/harmful
@article{yotam2026harmful,
title = "Harmful",
author = "Yotam, Kris",
journal = "krisyotam.com",
year = "2026",
month = "Apr",
url = "https://krisyotam.com/blog/technology/harmful"
}