Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?

The quantity of programmers has exploded. Programming was a lot harder and more frustrating before stackoverflow and other online resources. If you wanted to learn to program you had to struggle your way through. And those who did would end up being pretty decent programmers.

Nowadays there is no such filter. Anybody can get something to barely work by copy-pasting from stackoverflow. This isn’t a negative by itself, it just means that we now have many professional programmers who never had to try hard. And quality goes down as a result.

Code quality tends to be the worst in areas with very low barriers to entry (web stuff and such) and very high in domains where you need to be a good engineer in order to get anything done at all.

The Linux kernel is an easy example, sure, but it's not the only one. You can say the same thing about proprietary operating systems and software as well. It's been a long time since I've had misbehaving applications blue-screen Windows. That's something that used to happen daily when I ran Windows 98. Or if you prefer MacOS, I remember MacOS Lion being incredibly unstable, with beach-balls and crashes galore. That's all been fixed.

Applications have gotten better too. Browsers have gotten significantly more robust against misbehaving pages. Microsoft Office doesn't eat my work (even if I forget to hit ctrl-s).

In fact, I would go so far as to say that the only software which has gotten worse is video games. Used to be you could put in a disc, install the game, and be reasonably assured that you were getting a playable final product. Today, you put in the disc, install the game, and then have to download multiple gigabytes of patches... and the game is still often buggy (Bethesda, I'm looking at you!).

>99.99999% of software in big corporations will not have even 5% of the quality of the Linux kernel.

That is true. But it was equally true when Linus Torvalds dropped the first version of the Linux kernel all the way back in '91. It's not clear to me that things have gotten worse since then.

OS is a good example. Recent MacOS and Linux are easily the highest quality OSes that have existed. iOS and Android are quite good too. Unless you go back to when OSes could be extremely simple.

Because the amount of software is increasing?

If last decade only seasoned professional bakers baked bread, average bread quality would be amazing.

If this decade, _everyone wants to bake bread_, average bread quality would be pretty bad.

In addition to some of the answers already given, I can think of two reasons why a code-base deteriorates over time.

The first is that best practices, even if unanimously agreed upon, don't always survive contact with the user. Users will use software in ways that you didn't intend, and their usage patterns may expose bugs or have deleterious performance impacts on your code.

For example, if you're using a functional core, imperative shell design, you get all of the stability and ease-of-reasoning benefits from immutability within your functional core, but users may need to update part of your data model very frequently that you expected would seldom need to be changed, and the way the code is designed, changing this part of the model triggers a very expensive rebuild of the world. At that point, you're either forced to completely re-architect or come up with a clever hack for this one specific use case.

And re-architecting isn't always a guarantee of success. I once worked on a data warehouse system where the strong ACID properties of the database, along with the way the data was segmented ended up causing server with the specific hardware we were using. It's been decades, so I don't remember the exact issue, but something about issuing specific sequences of reads, seeks, and writes over and over caused and issue with the disk buffer, and when the OS periodically went to read data it needed, it ended up with our app's data instead. It was something that could be solved with a different server, but at the time, there was no budget for it, and a migration to new hardware wouldn't be possible until after the holiday retail season, so we ended up having to store some customers' data in files on disk rather than in a proper database. Then we had to change the schema in response to new requirements, so by the time we migrated to new hardware, reconciling the divergent schemas between the database and the database and the files was a nightmare, and it might never have gotten done without some serious politicking, which still took a couple years.

The second reason is that development environments change over time, and invalidate a lot of the assumptions apps are developed on. It's not just frameworks and libraries, but also languages.

I once worked on a Python 2 web service that did heavy text processing and had to make extensive use of Unicode. Just due to the history of how Unicode and Python developed in parallel, Python 2 had some eccentricities when it came to Unicode support. We understood all of these well and were able to develop a well-tested codebase that abstracted away these issues. Python 3 completely changed how the language handled Unicode, and the result on our project was disastrous. We essentially had to rewrite everything to make it work, but it was so messy we threw it all out and completely redesigned it. I can imagine a lot of companies wouldn't want to make that investment, especially since Python 3's Unicode support, while better, is still quite clunky compared to other languages. It's a hard sell to tell your boss you built something on top of broken Unicode support, and now you want to rebuild it on top of a different broken Unicode implementation. They'll just ask if you'll need to do that again in ten years.