Type: [[Simple]], [[System]], [[Creation]], [[Parable]] --- Busybox runs on more devices than possibly any other project except the linux kernel. Busybox is probably running on several embedded devices in the room you're in right now. For years, the maintainer of the busybox project was someone named Rob Landley. Rob Landley first got interested in busybox after he tried to read the GNU implementation of `cat`. All 833 lines of it. BusyBox's `cat` was 65 lines. And half of that was the license boilerplate at the top. Moral: When a developer opens the simplest program they can think of, to understand how it works, and sees 833 lines of C, that developer understands that code is not an asset. Features are an asset. Code is a liability. No one has ever loved a codebase more because it contains more lines of code. The ultimate moral battle in our field is between simplicity and complexity. It is a moral act in software, for security, for auditability, for education, and for future developers, to seek out and destroy unnecessary complexity wherever it can be found. --- See also: `cat -v` considered harmful - [here](https://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/) - [and here](https://lyngvaer.no/log/cat-v-history)