Software Is Hard (2007)

> The point is that web pages don't inherently need to do "pretty much anything." The web could have been simple and browsers could be simple. Stakeholders decided that no, we want more and more and more and even more features.

I did kindof address that in my final sentence. But there is a fair amount of inherent complexity in what I would want from a replacement for the web.

The web interface for Github should still be possible. Doing that would require a graphical layout engine (eg something like css), some way to manage authentication, and some way of submitting user data from a form. None of those require a turing-complete language, so I would perhaps be in favor of not having a JS equivalent, which would dramatically simplify the task of a browser, but there is still a lot of complexity there.

> And when you say simple is not correct, it is often because someone wants something complicated instead of acknowledging that simple, in fact, does all they really need.

The easiest case to say the simple is not enough is with encryption. I am not aware of any simple encryption algorithm. If you want to achieve, communication that others cannot eavesdrop in, simple is not enough.

Numerical stability in all sorts of applications is important and it is hard to achieve. Projecting the real number line into finite bits is hard to do in a consistent way.

You didn't contest my simple vs fast claim, but a good example of that is pathfinding algorithms. Dijkstra's algorithm is simple (relatively), but for many video games, a more advanced algorithm like hierarchical A* search or jump point search is needed.

Have you seen the 30 million line problem* by Casey Muratori (of Handmade Hero fame)? There is an argument that a lot of today's complexity in software is an (unnecessary) byproduct of changes in hardware design.

*https://youtu.be/kZRE7HIO3vk

> The easiest case to say the simple is not enough is with encryption. I am not aware of any simple encryption algorithm.

I disagree very much. Most crypto is very simple to use as well as implement. From DES to Chacha20, you can fit an implementation on a business card or two.

> Numerical stability in all sorts of applications is important and it is hard to achieve.

Counterpoint: I hardly ever need to worry about numerical stability, and most of the time I can just throw more bits at it.

> You didn't contest my simple vs fast claim, but a good example of that is pathfinding algorithms. Dijkstra's algorithm is simple (relatively), but for many video games, a more advanced algorithm like hierarchical A* search or jump point search is needed.

I wish the problem of complex software were just algorithms. Because most algorithms are easy to abstract in a box with loose coupling, and even the more complex algorithms usually boil down to some dozens of lines of code.

No, the millions of lines of code in big bloated applications are not made up of that.

There's cases where the game you want to make is so different that it's easier to write a new engine, like with the 4D graphics/physics in Miegakure (https://marctenbosch.com/news/). Ignoring unique features like those, most of what game engines do is magic incantations to make graphics cards work, file format munging, and resource management. That stuff can be copied over between projects pretty easily.

OTOH FPS mechanics like running, jumping, shooting are the core of the game and get re-implemented differently each time. Game engines don't really have much interaction implemented, and the physics they provide still has a lot of bugs, so behaviors end up with custom code most of the time.

Assets are kind of hit or miss as to whether they're reusable, and usually need some tweaking if they are reused.

Overall I'd say the reason games have moved to 3D is because of hardware support and better gameplay mechanics, rather than code reuse. Untitled Goose could have been an isometric tile game made in RPG Maker or whatever but they would have had to spend more effort on graphics and the physics glitches wouldn't be as funny.

Apparently Minecraft is still the top-selling game in the world; the code there was written completely from scratch.

I wonder if it's really software that's hard though, or that life in general is hard and software failures are just more visible.

And I reduced it. The aurhor had no say in the matter. He could have written in italics if he knew how, or ALL CAPS, and there would be little I could do about it. He could have worn a sandwich board and paced up and down a thoroughfare, but I would not have seen him.

People adapt their behavior to their communication media instinctively and continually, and are as routinely deliberately controlled thereby.