Stupid clickbait article.
this adds nothing to the debate and is just noise, please stop
Software Is Drowning the World
21–30 of 65 posts
Re: Software Is Drowning the World
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. IMO that's the root of the issue. If there was an incentive to invest in what the OP advocates for, it would have received a military level of funding and attention decades ago. Problem is, most people are under the illusion that software is like a woodwork or metalwork gadget: you make it once and it can work happily for 10 years without changes. Which is an extra funny thing to believe in because it doesn't ap…
I think I see it slightly differently. People have a shifting baseline of expectation around software that isn't present in "traditional" tools. The hammer you inherited from your grandfather still does what it did the day it was made, and so do ls and grep. It absolutely does not hammer nails at 10000x the speed while talking to every new kind of hammer made around the world, but somehow software is expected to gain…
> Thus they will always be surprised and grumble about the price. That just seems like human nature to me.
Absolutely. I see it the same way. After commercially programming for 19 years I've seen exactly zero progress in the human race with regards to that particular problem. It is apparently a built-in bug of our brains and everybody discovers it for themselves down the line (and 99% proceed to never fix it).
I think I recall one quote from a seemingly famous building architect (I think the guy who built the Fallingwater house, so Frank Lloyd Wright?) that was along the lines that you never put all expenses in plain view of the customer at first; you put a reasonable cost plan in front of them and then, after they are heavily invested in you, start giving them the other expenses (which are inevitable and not invented by you, let's accentuate that!). Many people call that a scummy practice but the truth is, EVERYONE is expensive, some are just better at selling themselves. So you have to give the customer the truth spoon by spoon because they prefer lies and truth is too hard to swallow at one bite.
And apparently that's how people tick. I don't like it either. But... blame the game, not the player -- as the saying goes.
Re: Software Is Drowning the World
#23Humans get into non-tech debt easily. And it turns out they get into tech debt easily too.
Re: Software Is Drowning the World
#24This is not only possible but has been done commercially.
I have a friend that contracted for a company doing y2k work. The main guy have written a system to parse cobol, do pattern matching to find y2k issues, apply transforms to the AST to fix the problems and the serialise back to cobol.
It supported a dozen of so cobol variants. I think it was very successful.
Re: Software Is Drowning the World
#25Things break down and things eventually need to be replaced. This has been a fact of life since time immemorial. I do tire of programmers acting as if the necessity of maintenance is some novel and unexpected problem, unique to software development, presented with hyperbolic titles like "software is drowning the world". Is physical infrastructure "drowning the world" because it needs to be maintained?
The inability to fully understand how a system works due to the interconnecting pieces is not a problem unique to software either! That ship sailed a long time ago. E.g. with cars can the average person now repair it at home and maintain the entire car themselves? It would be foolish to recommend that we "fix" cars because of our inability to personally understand the entire thing from inception to finish, yet some f…
Car maintenance can be shifted to another party with a different business model, eg leasing your car makes it someone else's problem.
Similarly, "Functions as a Service" makes many problems the hosting provider's problem. All of the low level goop is theirs. You still have OP's problems but the responsibility surface is reduced.
Re: Software Is Drowning the World
#26> Every time you decide to solve a problem with code, you are committing part of your future capacity to maintaining and operating that code. Software is never done.
I am clipping this for use in future internal discussions. I have trouble communicating this point, this sentence does so concisely.
Re: Software Is Drowning the World
#27Things break down and things eventually need to be replaced. This has been a fact of life since time immemorial. I do tire of programmers acting as if the necessity of maintenance is some novel and unexpected problem, unique to software development, presented with hyperbolic titles like "software is drowning the world". Is physical infrastructure "drowning the world" because it needs to be maintained?
In some cases arguably.
https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
But I think the initial-to-maintenance ratio of software is both different than for physical infrastructure, but also perhaps more importantly, very different than many decision-makers expect.
Re: Software Is Drowning the World
#28Totally agree. If the new version of a library requires a slightly updated usage; please just give me simple examples of how to update my code. Include a simple regex. And while we’re are it, let’s standardize how we provide those upgrade scripts. So when snyk tells me there’s and issue, it also easy to find and apply the necessary code changes (at least for the simplest 90% of cases). Like python’s “2to3”. It’s not…
Or you know, library deprecates "easy way of doing something" replacing it with "weird and convoluted" way of doing this again without any guidance of how to do the old thing
And unless the old way was genuinely bad/hard, why deprecate?
Re: Software Is Drowning the World
#29I think computation is still converging. It is too new to be expected to abide to universal standards. Cars, for instance have been around for over a century and they are still subject to change in standards, mainly because of safety and efficiency, just like software, but to a different degree. We should, however, have these kinds of discussion because I don't think we should outsource this debate to corporations. B…
The problem is financial incentives. I am not paid to devise such universal tooling. It's also a huge undertaking and much harder than all of my everyday's work. It's exploratory work that has the potential to revolutionize huge chunks of the programming area.
And I don't want to only be paid an average salary for it.
But... an excellent salary (above-average, maybe even above-high) would motivate me and no, I won't try to copyright that work and mooch off it for billions until I hit 80.
As I said: incentives. Many companies expect programming to be like installing a kitchen sink yet are unwilling to pay to commoditize the activity.
Re: Software Is Drowning the World
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
The inability to fully understand how a system works due to the interconnecting pieces is not a problem unique to software either! That ship sailed a long time ago. E.g. with cars can the average person now repair it at home and maintain the entire car themselves? It would be foolish to recommend that we "fix" cars because of our inability to personally understand the entire thing from inception to finish, yet some f…
Car maintenance can be shifted to another party with a different business model, eg leasing your car makes it someone else's problem. Similarly, "Functions as a Service" makes many problems the hosting provider's problem. All of the low level goop is theirs. You still have OP's problems but the responsibility surface is reduced.
But then you get an entirely new and surprising goop of problems like bursty lag problems (one out of 500 requests finishes in 5s instead of 0.1s), lack of consistency because one of the datacenters is offline, and so many others.
It's more like "you now have to deal with different problems" much more than it is "you have to deal with less problems". Maybe the problem quantity got reduced from 1000+ to 50+ but the latter might swallow much more time to solve so it's really questionable which of both is better.