Drew DeVault 2/21/2021

A great alternative is rarely fatter than what it aims to replace

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The author posits that truly great software alternatives succeed by distilling the core idea of their predecessor, removing cruft, and solving the problem with less complexity. Examples include Alpine Linux vs. other distros, musl libc vs. glibc, Go for systems programming, and UTF-8/JSON vs. older encodings. The piece contrasts this with tools that fail to supplant incumbents by merely being supersets, like zsh vs. bash, or by adding excessive complexity, like Rust vs. C.

A great alternative is rarely fatter than what it aims to replace

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