Anyone who thinks: No, just watch the apps you use and sites you visit for a week and mark down whenever something fails or loads too long. You will very fast change your mind.
Ask HN: Is Software Getting Worse?
51–60 of 107 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is Software Getting Worse?
#52It's UX for me. Maybe because I am getting old and I can't keep up with latest "software trends"
I literally had to google how to restart my phone the other day.
Re: Ask HN: Is Software Getting Worse?
#53you 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 m…
DaVinci Resolve. Proper video editing, VFX, and colour grading software as used on stuff you've seen in the cinema and on telly. Free, if you don't want the clever "neural engine" stuff or >4k timelines. Oh, you do want that? That'll be 300 quid then, and it's yours for life. They have never even charged for the updates, either. Of course, they make their money on cameras and control surfaces.
DaVinci and Ableton are both good examples to me. I love Ableton and use it a ton, but man does it crash almost every session for me. I finally bit the bullet and bought Resolve to use some of its non free effects and have already run into a number of bugs. I’m still very grateful I have access to that level of software, but it does feel like things being 90% complete at best is the standard these days.
Re: Ask HN: Is Software Getting Worse?
#54In my opinion, software is getting much, much better.
Twenty years ago, applications crashed all the time and there was no thought given to data recovery. For example, whilst writing this post, I accidentally clicked a link, then pressed back and Chrome hadn't lost my post. Back in the day, a mistimed backspace would irretrievably destroy your input. Video games frequently wouldn't work without messing with driver settings - how do I know if want to use glide or DX?
Playing a video involved messing around with codecs and if you were unlucky, the video was actually just a virus that would completely own your computer.
There is one major exception, which is websites. After the age of popups, but before the age of privacy warnings, there was this short window where you could just open a web page and it didn't have a whole bunch of crap you had to dismiss before you could access the content.
Re: Ask HN: Is Software Getting Worse?
#55you 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 m…
DaVinci Resolve. Proper video editing, VFX, and colour grading software as used on stuff you've seen in the cinema and on telly. Free, if you don't want the clever "neural engine" stuff or >4k timelines. Oh, you do want that? That'll be 300 quid then, and it's yours for life. They have never even charged for the updates, either. Of course, they make their money on cameras and control surfaces.
DaVinci recently also added hardware acceleration to the free version for .h265, which was previously only available in the paid version.
Re: Ask HN: Is Software Getting Worse?
#56Almost nobody cares about the value to the user anymore. Value to the owner/seller of the product is what matters. This results in poor UX, apps spying you constantly, useless features and easy to fix bugfixes that aren't fixed in years. As a software developer I'm disappointed in this approach. If I can I try my best to produce the best experience for the end user, but in the end I can only get satisfaction in open…
Please share the link so I can fork it and snag some of these sweet donations
Re: Ask HN: Is Software Getting Worse?
#57> Is software quality in decline? No, you just have a skewed memory of some time when software was "good". Remember Windows ME?
Perhaps the best counterpoint in the thread. That being said, the exception proves the rule, and I never had issues with 95 or XP. It’s crazy how many basic pieces of OS functionality stop working for me in windows 10.
Re: Ask HN: Is Software Getting Worse?
#58When was the last time you had to debug an IRQ conflict? I remember when "Plug and Play" was derisively nicknamed "Plug and Pray". Today, it all just works. When I'm assembling a computer, I don't have to set jumpers. I don't have to fiddle with making sure the boot drive is at the end of the IDE cable rather than the middle. I can just snap all the pieces together like Lego, hit the power button, and be assured that I'll get a bootable system (assuming, of course, that I haven't been a dolt and forgotten to plug the video card power cable in).
When was the last time you had an application blue-screen/bugcheck/kernel panic your machine? Yes, Windows still blue-screens from time to time, but over the past decade, I've found that 100% of my blue-screens have been caused by faulty drivers, rather than application code or bugs in the OS itself. This wasn't always the case. I remember, on Windows 98, there was one particular game that my brother had (I think it was Reader Rabbit), which would repeatedly and reliably blue-screen the machine when we got to a certain level. I haven't seen any errors like that in more than decade. And even the driver blue-screens are getting better. I remember not too long ago, my Windows PC's monitor blinked off, then came back. When I looked in Event Viewer, I saw that the GPU driver had crashed and had been automatically restarted. This is something that still causes kernel panics on Linux and MacOS, but Windows just shrugs it off and keeps on chugging.
With regards to Linux, when was the last time you had to mess with xorg.conf? Wifi drivers? WPA supplicant? I remember when I had to download the Windows drivers for my wireless card, extract the binary blobs, compile NDISWrapper, and then pray that I'd set everything up correctly, before unplugging the Ethernet cable to test whether my wifi was working. Now? I browse Hacker News while Linux is installing, because wifi drivers have been part of the kernel for years.
As for programming tools, they're more stable, robust, and widely available than ever. When was the last time you had to pay for a compiler, interpreter or language runtime? When was the last time GCC or LLVM crashed? Today one can write code in C, C++, Java, Python, Go, Rust, and a plethora of other languages... all for free, even on Windows! This is a huge improvement from the bad old days when your choices were to either pay for Borland or pay for Visual Studio. And as for web programming, do you really pine for the days when your only option for a backend language was a collection of perl scripts in `cgi-bin`?
The one regression, in my opinion, is with communication software. We used to have open (or "open-enough" i.e. reverse engineered) protocols that enabled multi-protocol, multi-platform clients such as Pidgin. That world is gone. Our communications are now siloed into proprietary, hostile software stacks, such as Slack, Google Meet and Teams. And our personal communications are siloed between Discord, WhatsApp, and the multifarious other messenger apps that we have to install in order to communicate with that one person who refuses to use anything else.
But other than comms, has software improved? I have a hard time arguing otherwise.
Re: Ask HN: Is Software Getting Worse?
#59Both of those are more web experiences than "software" in my books though the two are blurring. Web in general seems to be getting worse yes. Partly due to dark pattern-y BS but also because it's a hard problem. There are just so many combinations of configurations that it's hard to cover it all. See also those fingerprinting sites showing you're unique (your configuration)...that's effectively a measure of that dive…
Desktop UI has also gotten worse, mostly due to the mobile/web influence. Peek desktop UI was 15-20 years ago.
Re: Ask HN: Is Software Getting Worse?
#60Yes, and it's not just basic quality but also a lack of thoughtful implementation. For example "smart" IoT lightbulbs that do firmware updates during the night, when having some light would be kinda nice.
I especially find it frustrating how software gets more sluggish while at the same time we're making 500Hz screens, VR etc which should actually encourage the opposite.