I’m talking about programs that can’t be improved no matter what. They do exactly what they’re supposed to and will never be changed.
It’ll probably have to be something small, like cd or pwd, but does such a program exist?
Ed. It’s the standard text editor.
Many might disagree, but imo vim is the perfect text editor for a command line interface. It’s just so simpel and does exactly what I need it to do without doing anything unnecessary
neovim is a drop in replacement for vim that fixes the issues that bother me with vim
Might install that then in the future, if I remember it. Sudo apt-get install vim is just so ingrained in muscle memory
not sure why your getting downvoted
Nit: vim is a visual editor. It has a text interface, but it’s not a command line interface.
An example of a command line text editor would be sed.
I know it isn’t a cli but a text editor that you can use in a terminal, if there’s any other difference i got wrong feel free to correct me
Vim has some pretty messy design… Starting at some of the action quirks and ending at vim9script
Never heard of vim9script, what is it. I must admit I don’t use it for a lot of super complicated tasks just regular yaml and file editing. At for that it’s perfect imo
Vim9-script is a bespoke DSL introduced in vim 9 which was to replace vimscript (the old config language) It was recieved as a bit wacky with its support for classes among other things.
Yeah you probably can’t do to much more to
pwdoryesor whatever (yeah I know about the silly optimisations). I think once you get much beyond that there are always more features you can add. Even for something likecd, people have made fancier versions with fuzzy matching and so on.It’s on Github and has several PRs.
It was fault tolerant but I wouldn’t say it was perfect. There were plenty of “known issues”, and the fix in production was basically, “don’t do that”.
Windows event viewer… You open it, go to the toilet, to the shower, take a coffee, … and only 2 more minutes later, it shows you the entries…
It’s so perfect, they never had to improve it in decades.
/s
Depends on your definition of “perfect” and “improved”. Is it perfect because it does one fundamental thing really well? Is it improved by adding new features?
I think what you’re meaning is, is there a program that is ubiquitous (or at least works anywhere), will basically remain used forever because it does a fundamental job that will always need to be done, and it does that job in the most straightforward way possible that can’t be made any algorithmically simpler, faster, etc. Probably plenty, honestly. Bitwise operations, arithmetic, fetch/store, etc. Though ubiquity/working anywhere gets rarer the higher you go from hardware. Even your suggestion of cd, for example, has to interface with an OS’s file system, of which there are several common types. What it’s doing is simple in concept, but will always be dependent on other programs for the file system.
- vi
- grep
- curl
Ehhh, for curl there is a few features they’re working on (like better websocket support), and I’m sure there’s lots of optimizations that could be made, given how complex a project it is…
Notepad.exe, pre-windows 11. Now it’s something else entirely but still uses the name :(
I kinda love snipping tool.
Notepad did what it needed to do, but it could be improved in a lot of ways
Nah it was eternally annoying that it didn’t support Unix line endings. Also there are clearly a ton of basic features that people want from lightweight text editors.
Notepad in Windows 7 occasionally did some weird shit.
WinRAR free version
While WinRAR is pretty great, it has also had several severe security vulnerabilities over the years, including one last year:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinRAR#Security
Which isn’t quite what you’d expect from “perfect” software
LaTeX
Not sure about LaTeX, but TeX is widely considered to be almost “perfect” code.
TeX will be perfect after Knuth dies and the version number is incremented to π.
Error: Too many unprocessed floats.
ugh, no way. It might do a fine job with typesetting, but the user experience is utterly awful and that’s very unlikely to change because of design choices over 40+ years. If you don’t think so, give typst a real try.
Idk if it’s perfect but I really like the “literate programming” version of `
This is not the original, but here is one version of it : https://github.com/zyedidia/Literate/blob/master/examples/wc.lit
Your sentence abruptly ends in a backtick - did you mean to include something more? Maybe “
wc”?
Logic gates?
mcmaster.com is pretty close…
I don’t think such thing as perfect software exist, only abandoned software. If the environment changes, then the software needs changes too.
Or a new software.
Or a rewrite in Rust.
Same features, more bugs? Nah.
TempleOS
The dev of left-pad made it perfect by removing it.
