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If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

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Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#31

Post by cheschire »

fhd2 wrote: post #12

Right now, the majority of companies I interact with seems to look at their now (let's assume) increased capabilities, and turns up the speed. But there's other knobs to turn up instead. Robustness, quality, user experience. Optimistically, I think we might just enter a new phase at some point, where businesses make very conscious decisions about what to invest in to differentiate. Like, everyone has support bots now…

Bring back all the engineering rigor that people complained was too slow to keep up with VC-protected Silicon Valley competition.

And bring back change & configuration management processes and documentation reviews. All the boring slow stuff.

Except now make it part of your CI/CD pipeline.

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#32

Post by Kiro »

Hugsbox wrote: post #5

Just a little gripe, but near the end of the article he links to a site for something called "Omarchy" which appears to be a Linux distribution. If you click on the link, the only information available is in the form of a video. If you're making a Linux distro, please don't do this. I will not watch your video. I was interested, and now I'm not.

Bad advice considering the success Omarchy has had in marketing it. Whatever they're doing other distros should take note.

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#33

Post by prologic »

Software has neither gotten worse nor become any better. All you're seeing is the cost of writing code approach near zero. As that happens the speed at which you see defects increases. Software is by its very definition "malleable". It is without (or very few) constraints. So it is very hard to get "prefect". That is why IMO Site Reliability Engineering will be one of the few fields that will remain, because until we build an _actual_ goodness to gracious Intelligent System that can think critically, including how systems can fail (which includes humans), software will be what is hat always been "soft".

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#34

Post by fer »

> I opened Slack on macOS, the icon kept bouncing in the dock for a few seconds. I got impatient, switched to Ghostty, and started typing. Just then, the Slack window appeared, stole focus from Ghostty and the git pull command was sent to the group chat.

I still don't understand how a full focus stealability debounce is not the norm. If I am in the middle of writing, or interacting with one UI bit in any way, no other app should be able to steal focus, full stop. Add an annoying popup if you want, make angry computer noises, flash icons, I don't care. 99.9, if not 100% of the time, it's completely unrelated to what I'm doing and can absolutely wait. While some OSs have something along these lines, they also give the tools to bypass it (I'm looking at you, Cisco AnyConnect! Being connected after clicking on connect is not an emergency!)

Imagine you're working in a terminal and an app decides to steal STDIN. Why do we accept that for a GUI?

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#36

Post by worldthruword »

Jtarii wrote: post #21

Software quality has been declining for long before AI was a thing. Microsoft didn't need AI to make windows 11 as bad as it is. The incentives are large companies are fundamentally not in align with making high quality software people actually enjoy interacting with.

I think MS devs don't even use their windows OS. How do I know this? Because every week my favourite applications list gets reset. Why would anyone do that?

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#37

Post by frameset »

> I opened Slack on macOS, the icon kept bouncing in the dock for a few seconds. I got impatient, switched to Ghostty, and started typing. Just then, the Slack window appeared, stole focus from Ghostty and the git pull command was sent to the group chat.

One of my absolute favourite features on KDE Plasma with Wayland is the global setting to control what can steal focus. It works wonderfully, and I always miss it when I have to use my work mac or windows computers.

See here for docs, under "Focus stealing prevention" - https://docs.kde.org/trunk_kf6/en/kwin/kcontrol/windowbehavi...

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#38

Post by kilroy123 »

fhd2 wrote: post #12

Right now, the majority of companies I interact with seems to look at their now (let's assume) increased capabilities, and turns up the speed. But there's other knobs to turn up instead. Robustness, quality, user experience. Optimistically, I think we might just enter a new phase at some point, where businesses make very conscious decisions about what to invest in to differentiate. Like, everyone has support bots now…

Can confirm. I just had a nightmare experience with a company where the customer service sent very ChatGPT-like replies and seemed very unreasonable and AI like. I had to threaten legal action to get my money back.

Bizarre experience.

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#39

Post by danlitt »

Kiro wrote: post #32
Hugsbox wrote: post #5

Just a little gripe, but near the end of the article he links to a site for something called "Omarchy" which appears to be a Linux distribution. If you click on the link, the only information available is in the form of a video. If you're making a Linux distro, please don't do this. I will not watch your video. I was interested, and now I'm not.

Bad advice considering the success Omarchy has had in marketing it. Whatever they're doing other distros should take note.

Is there any evidence of people actually using it?

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#40

Post by rightbyte »

hypfer wrote: post #23
danlitt wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Omarchy is basically just Arch with a bunch of configuration. It's not a particularly useful project, and the author is noted fascist DHH. So probably not worth your time.

I think more precise terminology would go a long way here. What is "a fascist" (in context of being labelled that on the interwebs). That could mean a lot of things. As a reader, you learn basically nothing about DHH other than that some people might not like him. ___ So to fix that: DHH has always been a very opinionated guy - with not all of those being agreed on, but there being usually some kind of point to them.…

One could argue that fascist run FOSS projects might be working against your interest as a user.

Fascist is not just a silly label. The political collapse of neoliberalism made a lot of closet fascists emerge and they seem quite common among what was earlier thought of as "techno libertarians". E.g. the VPN provider owner (forgot which) just lately.

If there was too much crying wolf 15 years ago, doesn't really matter now anyways.

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