less_retarded_wiki/pseudominimalism.md
2022-09-03 14:13:46 +02:00

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Pseudominimalism

Pseudominimalism is the property of technology of trying to appear minimalist on the surface while being bloated on the inside. A typical example could be a website that has minimal look -- a blank white background with some fancy-font text perhaps -- which in the background uses dozens of JavaScript frameworks and libraries and requires a high end CPU to even appear responsive. Apple is heavily practicing pseudominimalism.

Another example are many modern CLI programs that code monkeys use to impress their YouTube viewers or to feel like matrix haxors. Some people think that anything running in the command line is minimalist which is less and less true as we progress into the future. A lot of capitalist software add a CLI interface ex post on top of an already bloated program, often by simply disabling GUI (but leaving all its dependencies in). An example may be the gomux chat client.

Yet another kind of pseudominimalism appearing among the new generation of pseudoprogrammers is about writing very few LOC in some hugely bloated language and calling that "minimalism". Something like a Minecraft clone in 100 LOC of Python using only Python standard library, the catch of course being that Python itself is hugely bloated and its standard library is enormous, therefore they just hide all the complexity out of view. Such effort is of course completely useless and only serves for flexing in front of beginners who can't spot the trick.