Extended pool of engineers, as the field has grown, has diluted the quality of software. Post "Social Network" (the movie), and the economic downturn of 2008-2012 there is a new generation of engineers that started programming/entered the field because that's where the money is.... There is also proliferation of the code-academies, who often encourage trainees to create a 'github portfolio', often with low quality li…
Ask HN: Is average code getting worse?
21–30 of 86 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is average code getting worse?
#22I don't think it's the code necessarily. It's the feature creep. It used to be that we just supported monitors - now it's touchscreens, tablets, watches, keyboards, mouse. It's LCD screens, plasma, TV, and so on. I find that code become exponentially more costly the more features you add in, because of the number of architectural layers you have to add on. And if you haven't planned for that, well, now you have to de…
Interesting that you should mention device support as a cause of more complex code, as the best way to support the devices you list is generally to use LESS code. Bare HTML is supported by pretty much everything...
I wish we went back plain HTML, especially for sites that don't need to be dynamic.
Re: Ask HN: Is average code getting worse?
#23Re: Ask HN: Is average code getting worse?
#24My small amount of experience has shown that people are astoundingly bad at intuiting generational change in crime, capability, and morality.
Re: Ask HN: Is average code getting worse?
#25I also find that this varies by the ecosystem. In PHP I would not assume that an external dependency is without flaws. In fact, I'd assume that it's mostly buggy simply due to the lack of a type system, but fine if I navigate the happy path. In Haskell I would assume that I'm using the library in a wrong way. In Haskell I also find that I can categorize libraries by quality and that, in the most cases, I'm not runnin…
Re: Ask HN: Is average code getting worse?
#261. The world is passing through troublous times. The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behavior and dress.
2. The children now love luxury; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are tyrants, not servants of the households. They no longer rise when their elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize over their teachers
3. I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise [disrespectful] and impatient of restraint
#1 was written in the 13th century, #2 in the 5th century BC and #3 in the 8th century BC. Old people always think young people are worse than ever.
I say this not to invalidate your feelings of frustration with how people are coding these days compared to the good old days. But ask yourself if your skills haven't improved in that time. Bugs that you would miss 10 years ago are now obvious to you. Also, there's just a lot more code out there than there used to be, judging by number of repos. The friction to put something into a public repository is lower than ever. That gets us some gems that might not have existed otherwise, but also some turds.
Rest assured that 10 years from now, devs will be talking about the good old days of today and how much better it was compared to 2030.
Re: Ask HN: Is average code getting worse?
#27- One that is so specifically designed to fix the authors' original problem. It is implemented in such a way that it doesn't cover a lot of use cases.
- One that is actually designed to be a general purpose library and to be used everywhere; but because of this there is a lot of feature creep and very complicated interfaces.
Re: Ask HN: Is average code getting worse?
#28Here are some quotes of people complaining about "youngsters these days". 1. The world is passing through troublous times. The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unlady…
Re: Ask HN: Is average code getting worse?
#29The barrier to entry is much lower.
In 1995, getting a C++ program compiled, tested, shrink wrapped and shipped (in waterfall fashion) required a lot more work. The "survivor" software you bought on your floppy disk or CD-ROM at the store meant it was high enough quality to jump through all those hoops. Some of those hoops were the software developers needed to know more about computers. Some were that you couldn't fix an issue after it was shipped in the wild pre-internet. Some of it was that a lot of those people had an intrinsic passion for the craft in which they weren't paid as well. They also did the work even though they were considered geeks, unlike now where a lot of "engineers" are indistinguishable from marketers and considered popular.