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Ask HN: Is Software Getting Worse?

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Re: Ask HN: Is Software Getting Worse?

#11

Post by an_aparallel »

you gave 2 large companies as examples.

There's SO MUCH incredible software out these days...better than anything thats come before it...software is getting better - media harvesting is getting worse. So...support good companies, and make a point of not supporting the ones which do this. It comes at a cost - but - that's life.

for creators, particularly in music - we've never had it better...

PAID -Ableton blows my mind - every time i touch it. -So does FL studio

FREE -Surge XT - most incredible free software synthesizer going -Vital - a free version of Serum which sounds incredible. -Ardour - a free protools stand in. -Air Windows - tonnes of audio processing plugins -Variety of Sound - beautiful UIs, awesome sound. -Blender...holy shit...

i could go on..

Re: Ask HN: Is Software Getting Worse?

#13

Post by sjadoinqwoeihad »

Software complexity is increasing. With the increased complexity many failure modes are not understood by developers. Thus those failures are not handled gracefully. This feels like a decline in quality. Depending on what you measure the quality could actually be better, the same or worse.

Re: Ask HN: Is Software Getting Worse?

#14

Post by hxelk1 »

I feel your pain. I think software is certainly getting much more complex (because it can, not because it has to). Complexity comes with a cost.

I hate when a mostly static website is rendered completely client side, for example. Most of the time, I just want to read the text, maybe see some (non-marketing) images, and that's it. I don't want hundreds of kilobytes of JS executed on my machine just for that.

Re: Ask HN: Is Software Getting Worse?

#17

Post by danybittel »

rco8786 wrote: post #5

> Is software quality in decline? No, you just have a skewed memory of some time when software was "good". Remember Windows ME?

I somewhat disagree. As an avid Visual Studio user.. it's definitly gotton worse. A lot of little Editor UX things seem to stop working.

Example: in C++, writing switch(..) on an enum would automatically default create all switch cases. Then later versions, it only occasionally did it, now it doesn't do it at all.

Another example: When my application finishes and VS is activated, sometimes the cursor is in one window, but typing happens in another.

Another example: In Windows 11, when resizing a window, the artifacts seem to have gotton worse. Sometimes even the whole window is flickering.

Re: Ask HN: Is Software Getting Worse?

#18

Post by negative_zero »

To me as a user, what's in decline is UI, UX and trust. Lots of software these days is just outright hostile in very "in your factface ways" and subtle ways.

Even software I pay for seems to try to screw me at every turn. "You paid for me? Have some ads! I'll scan everything you do and sell it off to the highest bidder! No you can't copy and send this image to a friend, but here's a link to try and lure them into the walled garden so I can data rape them too. Stay in my eco system it's great. You love it here! Click click click keeping clicking. Moar data to sell! Give moar! Data breach! I'm soz (but no compensation for you."

Oh and when you live off grid with little power you learn to hate electron apps. They are such power wasters. Three things cause my inverter to spin up its cooling fans: games, windows updates and electron apps. (And of course if you have "AC" plugged in most apps seem to think its a damn free for all for power. So its more power efficient to charge powered down and only run using battery if possible).

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