Software Disenchantment (2018)
tonsky.me
Software Disenchantment (2018)
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Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#2To put a finer point on it, software today is absolute garbage. I've been screaming about this for decades.
All of this bloated 'shitware' today is the result of it having been written by people who a) have no deeper understanding of what the computer is actually doing; also known as typical Python/Java/etc/etc/etc programmers, and/or b) simply not giving a damn about conservation of resources--as further evidenced by all of the other extremely wasteful and destructive habits they hold in their personal lives, and in their societies in general.
After all, this is the same civilization that's burning through increasingly vast quantities of oil at an astounding rate, despite the fact that previously existing abundant and cheap oil is nearly depleted, with no possibility of replenishment or replacement. So is it any surprise that foolish developers also burn through CPU and memory with reckless abandon?
Really, the problems we face aren't just in software; they're more about the foundations of our entire Western 'civilization.' Such problems generally tend to be rather intractable, in the historical view.
I'm working to construct, in my own computing life, something of a 'personal oasis', which is increasingly removed and estranged from all of the horrible things I see Other People out there having to suffer in their personal computing lives, thanks to talentless 'developers' who Just Don't Fucking Care. Some of these pricks actually have the audacity to call themselves 'engineers', even.
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#3Yes, it is true, many programming they don't do such a good job. I do try to make better software, but will not always succeed. Also computer hardware is becoming too complicated too actually, I think. I generally don't add so much dependencies to a program though. Some people (including myself) do still write DOS programs sometimes. The web browser is too complicated. I use IRC and NNTP, I think they are much better anyways than Slack and so on (and even this HN, too, I think). I do program in C (I use other programming languages as well, but mainly C). Many programs I think have too many animations. And a lot of programs, they just write it stupid!! TeX is good and it still works more than thirty years later, and is fast, too. But anyways I don't like WYSIWYG, so that is why I don't use LibreOffice and Microsoft Word and so on.
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#4To put a finer point on it, software today is absolute garbage. I've been screaming about this for decades. All of this bloated 'shitware' today is the result of it having been written by people who a) have no deeper understanding of what the computer is actually doing; also known as typical Python/Java/etc/etc/etc programmers, and/or b) simply not giving a damn about conservation of resources--as further evidenced b…
They seem to believe civilization is always and is necessarily a good thing, and is not a bad things. No! Like many things, civilization is both good and bad.
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#5Even quite underpowered phones can boot in ~1-2 seconds if optimized for that. Not everything in the phone will startup in that amount of time (modem, wifi), but it's possible to start to Linux userspace and display fully interactive UI in that amount of time.
Even my e-book reader Linux port boots to UI in ~2s.
It really is just bloat and lack of care.
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#6Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18012334
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#7To put a finer point on it, software today is absolute garbage. I've been screaming about this for decades. All of this bloated 'shitware' today is the result of it having been written by people who a) have no deeper understanding of what the computer is actually doing; also known as typical Python/Java/etc/etc/etc programmers, and/or b) simply not giving a damn about conservation of resources--as further evidenced b…
Buddy, oil isn't running out anytime soon. If you want better programmers, maybe we should have more than a handful of universities that have programs whose sole purpose is churning out the same type of developers you're shitting on.
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#8I agree it's all slower and sucks. But I don't think it's solely a technical problem.
1/ What didn't seem to get mentioned was the speed to market. It's far worse to build the right thing no one wants, than to build the crappy thing that some people want a lot. As a result, it makes sense for people to leverage electron--but it has consequences for users down the line.
2/ Because we deal with orders of magnitude with software, it's not actually a good ROI to deal with things that are under 1x improvement on a human scale. So what made sense to optimize when computers were 300MHz doesn't make sense at all when computers are 1GHz, given a limited time and budget.
3/ Anecdotally (and others can nix or verify), what I hear from ex-Googlers is that no one gets credit for maintaining the existing software or trying to make it faster. The only way you get promoted is if you created a new project. So that's what people end up doing, and you get 4 or 5 versions of the same project that do the same thing, all not very well.
I agree that the suckage is a problem. But I think it's the structure of incentives in the environment that software is written that also needs to be addressed, not just the technical deficiencies of how we practice writing software, like how to maintain state.
It's interesting Chris Granger submitted this. I can see that the gears have been turning for him on this topic again.
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#9I totally agree with him that it's awful, but I think the problem is that making things efficient is expensive in terms of time and having to hire expertise. Evidently efficiency just doesn't have enough return on investment for companies to care. The thing about looking back at the windows 95 era and comparing it to now, is that windows 95 needed to be efficient to be usable, windows 10 doesn't.
The exception would be games and embedded software, but even there, there's certain degrees of lazyness. For instance, games are very cpu/memory/gpu efficient, but they're almost always ridiculous when it comes to disk space usage. There's no reason that your average AAA game needs to take up 50GB other than that things which could address that aren't worth the fuss. (I'm thinking common demo-scene tricks like procedural textures/data/everything, aggressive compression schemes, reusing assets, etc.)
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#10Everyone is so angry. Isn't this the the world of ubiquitous code and unlimited resources we wanted?
Not everything needs to be super efficient. Most things are tuned for production cost and time. Efficient code isn't going anywhere. Relax guys.