Examples off the top of my head:

• Almost everything about TCP/IP stack
• NETCONF
• YAML
• Most things related to cars and car infrastructure
• Alcohol
• Chiclet keyboards
• Unicode Han unification
• Layer 2 SDN
• Kubernetes
• JavaScript
• Disk partitioning
• UEFI
• Public transit fares

Edit: checked the link and was surprised our lists didn't have any ones in common (though I considered including MS Excel).

ehh. even in the original text it rapidly decays into anything that annoys him is a hyperkludge. Successful things have problems that are only problems of success.

I'm surprised that alphabetical lists are included. Maybe my brain has completely rotten, but keeping the data sorted is pretty neat for efficient processing

Counterpoint: to what extent are hyperkludges actually a unique thing versus an aspect of how technologies and tools are integrated into human context? Like, one of the original examples is the TCP/IP stack, but as anyone who has had to wrangle multiple vendors can attest a lot of the value in that standardization necessarily comes from the network effects - the fact that it's an accepted standard. The web couldn't function if you had a bespoke protocol stack hand-made to elegantly handle the specific problems of a given application not just because of the difficulty in building that much software (i.e. network effects on the design and construction side) but because of how unwieldy and impractical it would be to get any of those applications in front of people. The fit of those tools for a given application is secondary to how much more cleanly the entire ecosystem can operate because they are more limited in number.

The OP also talks about how embedded the history of a given problem is in the solution which feels like the central explanation for this trend. In that sense a hyperkludge isn't a unique pattern that some things fall into and more a way of indicating a particularly noteworthy whorl in the fractal infinikludge that is all human endeavors.

this rules <3

oh that's pretty great

After reading some of the counterpoints here, I began thinking about how I considered Excel a hyperkludge if you qualify it enough. I realized the qualifications apply to every programming language (good ol' Turing Completeness). I think, in my case, the common scenario of

1. this tool^[1]^ is just a proof of concept/prototype
2. it costs less to maintain our tool than to write a more appropriate solution from scratch
3. our infrastructure is now the tool

had me erroneously criticizing the tool instead of its application^[2]^. In the case of Excel, I worked a few jobs where the spreadsheets used when the company was small led to an absolute nightmare after the company grew.

I appreciate the thoughtful responses from everyone. <3

1: Usually a spreadsheet, in my experience.
2: Noting that, while "it's not the tool, it's the application" is a common refrain from people using tools in shitty ways, there is a distinction between "this is the wrong tool for the job" and "this tool will hurt people".