Kubernetes' Tim Hockin on a decade of dominance and the future of AI in open source

Tim Hockin has been working on Kubernetes since before it was announced. As the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) takes a sudden lurch into the world of artificial intelligence, Hockin spoke to The Register about trends, licensing, and his love of Vi. Next year will mark a decade since the initial release of Kubernetes …

[CowHorseFrog]

k8 what a horrible user experience that is with all those yamls, no validation, poor error messages, unsafe conversion of large numbers into floats and more.

[Paul Smith]

And the alternative is... ?

[Michael Wojcik]

YAML I don't have a problem with; it's more human-readable and easier to edit than XML, and a human-editable configuration file beats a binary one any day.

But in general I take your point. This industry blithely accepts a level of quality and usabilty which should really be unacceptable. When I taught web application design at university, one of the required texts was Platt's Why Software Sucks because I wanted to emphasize that quality and usability, like security, should be part of the development process from the start.

That said, it's not a particularly relevant comment on the article, is it? Even if we assume Kubernetes is terrible, that says nothing about Hockin's opinions about how software succeeds, open-source licensing, or the rush to put "AI" into everything. In fact, his comments mostly advise some skepticism, which rather accords with any complaints about his own work.