The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
techtrenches.substack.com
The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
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Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
#2I’ve read some versions of this post dozens of times over the years. At first I would nod along, sympathetic but now I realise that we shouldn’t chase some platonic ideal of perfect software. It has to exist in the real world and there will always be trade offs. In the end, most software exists to make businesses money.
Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
#3I don't want to sound too dismissive, but all these arguments have been brought up time and again. The move from assembler to high level languages. The introduction of OOP. Component architecture / COM / CORBA / etc. The development of the web browser. The introduction of Java.
2018 isn't "the start of the decline", it's just another data point on a line that leads from, y'know, Elite 8-bit on a single tape in a few Kb through to MS Flight Simulator 2020 on a suite of several DVDs. If you plot the line it's probably still curving up and I'm not clear at which point (if ever) it would start bending the other way.
Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
#4The fact that software quality plays zero role in commercial software engineering is one of the reasons why I think LLMs will easily eat our lunch. Bugs simply don't matter.
Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
#5I highly doubt that 2018 was year of "quality focus" and 2020 year of "memory is cheap". The downward spiral started at least twenty years earlier.
Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
#6the dates on x axis are all wrong, hardware was cheap at least 30 years earlier. people were complaining about the concept illustrated by this chart for all this time, too. I was using Python professionally before 2010, ask me how I know.
Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
#7I’ve read some versions of this post dozens of times over the years. At first I would nod along, sympathetic but now I realise that we shouldn’t chase some platonic ideal of perfect software. It has to exist in the real world and there will always be trade offs. In the end, most software exists to make businesses money.
And buggy software makes more money because customers have a reason to buy subscription.
Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
#8Hes right that cloudstike was terrible incompetence but I find it hard to worry about the memory leak stats. If lots of software leaks memory these days its because people have accepted that and its probably not economic to trace and fox those bugs. A lot of software is disposable or transient these days, like an app you only use twice a month
Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
#9> Every 10x increase in model size requires 10x more power
Does it? I’ll be the first to admit I am so far behind on this area, but isn’t this assuming the hardware isn’t improving over time as well? Or am I missing the boat here?
Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
#10Just false nostalgia memory.
20 years ago things werent any better. Software didn't consume gigabytes of ram because there was no gigabytes of ram to consume.