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The Software Crisis

wryl.tech

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Re: The Software Crisis

#71

Post by nicce »

beryilma wrote: post #58

I don't think we have a software crisis. Millions of programmers are able to create more or less useful programs all over the word; everything including your toaster is running software on it succesfully enough; and the community was able to build programs that are accessible to all from a 5 year old kid all the way to your grandparents. Where is the crisis in it? However, we have a project management crisis, which i…

> I don't think we have a software crisis. Millions of programmers are able to create more or less useful programs all over the word; everything including your toaster is running software on it succesfully enough; and the community was able to build programs that are accessible to all from a 5 year old kid all the way to your grandparents. Where is the crisis in it?

About that toaster point; this is the actual, real, concrete example of the software crisis. Your toaster runs bad code. Bad code that is not designed with resiliency or security in mind but is connected to internet. It reduces your toaster's lifetime. In the past, you might have had a toaster which lasted 10 years. Now, because of the bad software and maybe even mandated Wifi or Bluetooth connection, your toaster is garbage after 2 years because the vendor stopped pushing updates. Or maybe there were no updates at all. But because we might not always directly see it, or because the current hyper consumption and never-ending buying of new products, the crisis is not always that visible.

We might be even okay that toaster stopped working after 2 years, and did not pay attention or knew why that happened. But maybe it was part of Mirai botnet https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ddos/glossary/mirai-botn...

Likely toaster was not part of that, as they use simpler chips, but who knows.

Re: The Software Crisis

#72

Post by wryl »

williamcotton wrote: post #55
wryl wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really, really cool! Definitely going to share this around, I love tools like this. They bring so much visibility into dark spaces.

Thanks! I started on it a week ago so it is just barely presentable at this point. I expect there are many glitches and bugs that I am completely unaware of! The parser is off-the-shelf and seems robust. The AST-to-bash aspect is a bit messy. Wrapping arguments with spaces in them with either " or ' is somewhat of an unsolved problem. Like, it's hard to tell if someone wants to embed a bash variable and thus wants "…

It's still really impressive! Comparisons were thrown around to nushell, which is also a really impressive project. I can see the vision and I hope to follow along! :)

Re: The Software Crisis

#73

Post by wvenable »

asdfman123 wrote: post #62
wvenable wrote: post #35

This article presupposes that this software crisis actually exists or is a significant problem. The crisis is all this these things: Projects running over-budget Projects running over-time Software was very inefficient Software was of low quality Software often did not meet requirements Projects were unmanageable and code difficult to maintain Software was never delivered Now take the word "software" out and how many…

The article doesn't do a good job of explaining what they determine the actual crisis is. Complexity in and of itself isn't a problem. The problems you listed, however, are. But I don't think that's the real motivation for articles like these: the real motivation is that things just seem out of hand. But I think as an experienced programmer you have to balance that feeling of overwhelm with what needs to be done. It'…

I think being a software developer is always being in conflict with reality. Most of our job is logic and rules. Preciseness and completeness. Reality, however, is full of people, chaos, and change and we are uncomfortable by that. I think this is why programmers have such strong opinions on languages, tools, and techniques.

Over the years I've started to tune out articles that say everything is doomed or articles that propose the silver bullet to fix everything. Things are not terrible -- they are, in fact, always getting better. It's never been a better or easier time to be a software developer. But, because of that, the problems we have to solve are harder. The demands are greater. I think this appears to many like we're stuck in place because we always feel like we're behind the 8 ball. The appetite for software is insatiable.

Re: The Software Crisis

#74

Post by Animats »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #8
Animats wrote: post #2

The ending: "Things can be better. I'll show you how." It's just an intro for clickbait.

The prime criteria for being clickbait is if it is sensationalized, deceptive, or intentionally misleading. This strikes me as none of those things. It's the last sentence of a blog post.

It's something where you have to read the introductory material, and then find out the important part is elsewhere. In this case, in a blog post yet to come.

Re: The Software Crisis

#75

Post by marcosdumay »

wvenable wrote: post #35

This article presupposes that this software crisis actually exists or is a significant problem. The crisis is all this these things: Projects running over-budget Projects running over-time Software was very inefficient Software was of low quality Software often did not meet requirements Projects were unmanageable and code difficult to maintain Software was never delivered Now take the word "software" out and how many…

> how many human endeavours have one or all of these things?

You want a binary answer as in "it never happens with X"? Because for most kinds of project, we say it didn't go well when 1 or 2 of those happen, while we declare a victory in software if we manage to avoid 2 of them.

> And then how much software is actually pretty great?

And now I'm curious about your bar for "pretty great" software. This is obviously subjective, but most people wouldn't look at any practical software and call it great.

Re: The Software Crisis

#76

Post by peter_d_sherman »

>"We developed methods of building nested layers of abstractions, hiding information at multiple levels. We took the problem of constructing software and morphed it into towering layers."

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_(computer_science)

(Compare and contrast!)

Re: The Software Crisis

#77

Post by kwhitefoot »

kleiba wrote: post #45

OT: anyone's got an idea why Firefox would not be able to display that page in reader mode (button in the URL bar not showing up)? For some reason, my eyes cannot cope with white text on black backgrounds, so I usually just go to reader mode in cases like this article. But here, this option does not exist, for some reason?

No idea. And I won't be reading it either.

Someone wanting the world's attention because of a crisis really should not add extra friction.

Re: The Software Crisis

#78

Post by adamrezich »

rednafi wrote: post #51

It’s absurd to complain about abstraction. Hardware will continue to leapfrog the pace of software innovation and things will keep getting better. Sure layers of abstraction is leaky and has their issues, but I don’t want to write a hipster language in a hipster editor. If you enjoy that, great. Also, it’s easy to look at the past with rose tinted glasses. Modern softwares are bloated mess but still a million times m…

> Hardware will continue to leapfrog the pace of software innovation and things will keep getting better.

This is wishful thinking. Try running Windows 2000 on era-appropriate consumer hardware and tell me just how much better off we truly are now with bloated and unresponsive web apps.

> Also, it’s easy to look at the past with rose tinted glasses. Modern softwares are bloated mess but still a million times more productive.

What metrics are you using to quantify "a million times more productive"?

Re: The Software Crisis

#79

Post by bsoles »

nicce wrote: post #71
beryilma wrote: post #58

I don't think we have a software crisis. Millions of programmers are able to create more or less useful programs all over the word; everything including your toaster is running software on it succesfully enough; and the community was able to build programs that are accessible to all from a 5 year old kid all the way to your grandparents. Where is the crisis in it? However, we have a project management crisis, which i…

> I don't think we have a software crisis. Millions of programmers are able to create more or less useful programs all over the word; everything including your toaster is running software on it succesfully enough; and the community was able to build programs that are accessible to all from a 5 year old kid all the way to your grandparents. Where is the crisis in it? About that toaster point; this is the actual, real,…

But I wouldn't call a toaster running code an example of software crisis. Call it business crisis or crisis of capitalism/consumerism, but it is not software crisis.

I agree wholeheartedly that an internet connected toaster is a very stupid idea, but our ability to build such a system shows, if anything, a triumph of software (and hardware), not a crisis. What is a crisis here is societal one; the fact that there is a demand, however artificially created, for such things. Software abstractions or layers of abstractions to be able to build such devices have nothing to do with this kind of crisis.

Re: The Software Crisis

#80

Post by marcosdumay »

heurist wrote: post #38
steveBK123 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could buy this argument. Had I been a junior during the agile era, I'm not sure I would have developed as fast or as far as I have. The most agile pilled company I worked for just treated juniors & seniors as interchangeable cogs, except seniors should be able to clear more points per sprint. Active discouragement from thinking outside the scope of your ticket, keep your head down and mouth shut.

When I was starting out a bit more than a decade ago, I was on an agile/scrum software team in a hardware company. The team was fine but I found the process painful. I ejected as soon as a new director realized he could do algebra with the story points and began plotting stories quarters out. I've never been on a scrum team since and am happier for it. As a manager now, I would push back on scrum in almost every situ…

The problem with "agile" is that everybody claims to do it. Companies with a healthy environment cram their procedures into agile-derived names, and keep the healthy environment, while unhealthy ones also cram their procedures into agile-derived names, and use their universality as an excuse to never improve.

I think scrum is irremediable, but even then, some places only practice it pro-forma: divide the work into tickets at the beginning of the sprint, rewrite the tickets into what they did at the end, and go home happy.

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