this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2026
46 points (97.9% liked)
Programming
25249 readers
661 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I would say doneness is about completeness within context, not immutability.
The environment may change, but within context, it can still be considered done.
It's fine to say and consider software never done, because there are known and unknown unknowns and extrapolations and expectations. But I think calling something done has value too.
It is a label of intention, of consideration, within the current context. If the environment changes and you want or need to use it, by all means update it. That doesn't mean the done label assigned previously was wrong [in its context].
We also say "I'm done" to mean our own leave, even when there is no completeness on the product, but only on our own tolerance.
In the same way, if you shift focus, done may very well be done and not done at the same time. Done for someone in one environment, and not done for someone in another.
More often than 'done' I see 'feature complete' or 'in maintenance mode' in project READMEs, which I think are better labels.
Mmm, interesting. Doesn’t Haskell have a monad that represents everything external to the program, for like producing I/O? In some ways I suppose that mentality makes explicit this idea you’re expressing that the environment the program runs in is implicit in the program? A software equivalent of “no man can step in the same river twice, for neither is it the same river nor is he the same man?”