No. It isn't in decline. Saying it is in decline assumes there was a period of time where it was better.
There are a lot of bad programmers out there. There is, and always had been a lot of bad software
Ask HN: Is Software Getting Worse?
101–107 of 107 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is Software Getting Worse?
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have written a lot of responses about why am I a little wrong on every my sentence but I don't see any powerful point. What is the most important feature of post-2012 CPU and except of energy consuming?
a little wrong Pretty much everything you said was not only wrong, it didn't even have anything to do with your point. What is the most important feature of post-2012 CPU and except of energy consuming? They are faster per clock cycle, run at higher frequencies, have more cores, more memory bandwidth, more pcie bandwidth, wider SIMD lanes, deeper out of order buffers, much more cache and more execution units.
> They are faster per clock cycle, run at higher frequencies, have more cores, more memory bandwidth, more pcie bandwidth, wider SIMD lanes, deeper out of order buffers, much more cache and more execution units.
This is called extensive progress, no intensive developing since 2012 as it was mentioned before I have joined discussion. You are completely wrong about frequency (no increase since Haswell's 4Ghz) and somewhat boring about other points so I will not answer here any more.
Re: Ask HN: Is Software Getting Worse?
#103When 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…
> When was the last time you had to debug an IRQ conflict? Never. But in my home server I have 4, sometimes 5 RAID controllers. Some combinations of RAID/AHCI/IDE modes won't work due to lack of resources. I presume it's about I/O addresses - the boot message is not really informative compared to Device Manager. I regret not taking a picture of the error message. The system won't even pass the POST when this happens.…
I'm not going to respond to your points one by one. My overall response to you is that the system you're describing, with its multitude of RAID controllers, ancient webcam, overclocked CPU, etc, etc, wouldn't even have been possible to put together in the '90s. You'd have ended up spending all your time debugging random crashes and failures, and figuring out how to get stuff working. Whereas today, it's usable and functional and, while it still might have issues, it at least all works most of the time.
As far as the system not recognizing newer processors without a BIOS update, that was also true in the '90s. It's just that, back then, things changed so much, you'd just end up tossing the entire motherboard when it came time to install a new CPU, and you'd "upgrade" the BIOS that way.
Re: Ask HN: Is Software Getting Worse?
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
a little wrong Pretty much everything you said was not only wrong, it didn't even have anything to do with your point. What is the most important feature of post-2012 CPU and except of energy consuming? They are faster per clock cycle, run at higher frequencies, have more cores, more memory bandwidth, more pcie bandwidth, wider SIMD lanes, deeper out of order buffers, much more cache and more execution units.
> They are faster per clock cycle, run at higher frequencies, have more cores, more memory bandwidth, more pcie bandwidth, wider SIMD lanes, deeper out of order buffers, much more cache and more execution units. This is called extensive progress, no intensive developing since 2012 as it was mentioned before I have joined discussion. You are completely wrong about frequency (no increase since Haswell's 4Ghz) and somew…
This is called extensive progress, no intensive developing since 2012
This is a word salad that means nothing. Where did you even get these ideas?
You are completely wrong about frequency (no increase since Haswell's 4Ghz)
Why would you say something that is so obviously wrong and easy to disprove? Most current AMD cpus have base clocks that are higher than 4ghz, let alone their boost clocks.
https://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-9-7950x-cpu-5-85-ghz-peak-5-1...
Re: Ask HN: Is Software Getting Worse?
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The physical world has peaked, in every metric. How do you figure that? Seems to me that things are still rapidly changing. Starlink, fusion, JWST, computer hardware, 3D printing etc...loads still happening.
All statistics show 2016 being peak in population growth in the western world. Acceleration stopped 1968. CPU improvements stalled around 2012. GPU around 1030 so in 2017. Energy is the master resource.
CPUs have improved so much with AMDs chiplet push.
I can now buy an eight core AMD/Intel CPU for 300 $/€ that the people of 2012 could only dream about.
This thing enables me to have my complete production environment on my machine and develop faster. Apart from that programs in general run very fast. I don't want to go back to 2012.
Re: Ask HN: Is Software Getting Worse?
#106Honestly, I think the answer is no. But the sheer amount of software in our world is increasing. So if software quality lands on a bell curve, you'll see the lower end of that curve more often. Which actually argues that software quality is increasing - when so much of it "just works", the ones that don't stand out.
For software quality to have bell curve distribution, you have to define negative software quality first and then proceed to define inifinite qualities also. Otherwise it is either one-sided distribution (when there is no negative quality) or bounded distribution. Both cases have no guarantee to have sums of independent variables to converge to a bell curve. Log-normal distribution certainly does not converge to normal distribution however hard you try [1].
[1] https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/238529/the-sum-of-...
Which brings up the question: what is negative software quality? Can we define that?
Re: Ask HN: Is Software Getting Worse?
#107Honestly, I think the answer is no. But the sheer amount of software in our world is increasing. So if software quality lands on a bell curve, you'll see the lower end of that curve more often. Which actually argues that software quality is increasing - when so much of it "just works", the ones that don't stand out.
I lean to yes, because even things that formerly worked, fail without good reason. If feels like quality is not a top priority anymore, and I think that trend started with network patches, suddenly you could sell unfinished software while you still work at it. For example, the most recent update to iBooks from Apple glitches if you rotate the screen, and stays that way even if you rotate it back. iBooks is an app tha…
Te most recent update fixed this issue. While the easy workaround was loking rotation inside iBooks preferences, I much prefer for it to follow the orientation.
That was fast, which is the bright side of network patches.