git-of-theseus VS yesql

https://github.com/erikbern/git-of-theseus

A tangentially related tool you can use to look at a repo over time is Git of Theseus[1]. It shows things like "what percentage of the code in this repo survives 6 months.

[1]https://erikbern.com/2016/12/05/the-half-life-of-code.html

There're some more in the presentation article: https://erikbern.com/2016/12/05/the-half-life-of-code.html#:...

A kernel line has half-life 6.6 years.

Look at the codebase with Git of Theseus or Codescene

I guess one good example (that was mentioned just yesterday here on HN) would be Flask vs FastAPI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31953470 - "There are no open issues or pull requests on Flask "

Quick count finds that FastAPI has 48422 lines of code, while Flask has 9995. Flask just achieved "Zero standing issues/PRs" while FastAPI has 1.1K open issues and ~500 open PRs.

Large surface area/API quickly leads to be overwhelmed when you're trying to maintain it. Adding new features/fixing existing ones becomes harder as well.

Best bet to make sure something is maintainable over time is to add as little as possible to it, and if you really have to, make sure you're also removing something at the same time.

Otherwise you need a massive team just to be able to "survive" and not making things rot.

There is this blogpost as well about the "half-life of code": https://erikbern.com/2016/12/05/the-half-life-of-code.html

Someone run that tool on the Clojure codebase as well, and it really shows how well the Clojure codebase has been written, as most code that was initially written is still there and does what it needs, without having to be rewritten.

Some parts of technical debt, you can find with https://github.com/erikbern/git-of-theseus or https://codescene.com/

There's a whole family of libraries like that. Yesql is the first I became aware of. The repo has an (incomplete) list of ports to other languages: https://github.com/krisajenkins/yesql#other-languages

> People will not read the docs.

Reminds me of a pull request I made a while ago

https://github.com/krisajenkins/yesql/pull/151/files

The first piece of code on the readme is "not the solution" (lol), and everybody I knew who was trying to use that library was copy-pasting that specific piece of code from the readme.

If you're not familiar with lisps in general, it might be hard to grok the differences between lisp-macros (as used in Clojure) and "normal" macros you see in other languages.

But, if you are familiar already, and just wanna see examples of neat macros that makes the API nicer than what a function could provide, here are a few:

- https://github.com/clojure/core.async/blob/master/examples/w...

- https://github.com/weavejester/compojure

- https://github.com/ptaoussanis/timbre

- https://github.com/krisajenkins/yesql