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Software Disenchantment (2018)

tonsky.me

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Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#131

Post by originalvichy »

buboard wrote: post #68

He has a nice follow up which gets to the reasons why https://tonsky.me/blog/good-times-weak-men/ Another take: rewrites and rehashes tend to be bad because they are not exciting for programmers. Everything you re about to write is predictable, nothing looks Clearly better and it just feels forced. First versions of anything are exciting, the possibilities are endless, and even if the choices along the path are subop…

Time is money and engineers aren't given time to properly finish developing software before releases.

Add to this the modern way of being able to hotfix or update features and you will set an even lower bar for working software.

The reason an iPod didn't release with a broken music player is that back then forcing users to just update their app/OS was too big an ask. You shipped complete products.

Now a company like Apple even prides itself by releasing phone hardware with missing software features: Deep Fusion released months after the newest iPhone was released.

Software delivery became faster and it is being abused. It is not only being used to ship fixes and complete new features, but it is being used to ship incomplete software that will be fixed later.

As a final sidenote while I'm whining about Apple: as a consultant in the devops field with an emphasis on CI/CD, the relative difficulty of using macOS in a CI/CD pipeline makes me believe that Apple has a terrible time testing its software. This is pure speculation based on how my experience. A pure Apple shop has probably solved many of the problems and hiccups we might run into, but that's why I used the term "relatively difficult".

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#132

Post by throwawayjava »

jwcacces wrote: post #117
xchaotic wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why were you using EDGE if there’s dense 4G coverage in Rome ?

(not gp) I have T-Mobile service in the USA, and my plan includes free international phone and data, but only at EDGE speeds. I could get a local SIM, but it's rarely worth it if I'm traveling to multiple countries.

https://fi.google.com is great if you travel often.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#133

Post by cortesoft »

buboard wrote: post #95
coldtea wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Combining these two is only a non-issue with unlimited resources. Otherwise it's a tradeoff if you add constraints like cost, effort, time to market, and so on...

Windows does it. And despite that, versions like win 7 were pretty fast

I have heard a lot of complaints about the costs to the Windows ecosystem caused by having to always maintain backwards compatibility.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#135

Post by jodrellblank »

pm90 wrote: post #76

IMO the article is painting a really negative picture about the state of technology. Any profession with large enough practitioners will create tons of crappy stuff; with most professions that crap is just not discoverable. e.g. if you're a crappy carpenter, only your city or neighborhood can see your shitty work. But if you make a crappy website or app, anyone in the world can see and use it.

Sturgeon's Law, "Ninety percent of science fiction is crud, but then ninety percent of everything is crud".

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#136

Post by mynegation »

jiofih wrote: post #88
buboard wrote: post #68

He has a nice follow up which gets to the reasons why https://tonsky.me/blog/good-times-weak-men/ Another take: rewrites and rehashes tend to be bad because they are not exciting for programmers. Everything you re about to write is predictable, nothing looks Clearly better and it just feels forced. First versions of anything are exciting, the possibilities are endless, and even if the choices along the path are subop…

He hints at Electron in the end, but I think the real blame lies on React which has become standard in the past five years. Nobody has any fucking idea what’s going on in their react projects . I work with incredibly bright people and not a single one can explain accurately what happens when you press a button. On the way to solving UI consistency it actually made it impossible for anyone to reason about what’s happe…

What is better? Jquery? It comes with its own can of worms and React designers had solid reasoning to migrate away from immediate DOM modification. In general UI is hard. Nice features like compositing, variable width fonts, reflow etc come with the underlying mechanisms that are pretty complicated and once something behaves different to the expectations it might be hard to understand why.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#137

Post by vsareto »

jiofih wrote: post #88
buboard wrote: post #68

He has a nice follow up which gets to the reasons why https://tonsky.me/blog/good-times-weak-men/ Another take: rewrites and rehashes tend to be bad because they are not exciting for programmers. Everything you re about to write is predictable, nothing looks Clearly better and it just feels forced. First versions of anything are exciting, the possibilities are endless, and even if the choices along the path are subop…

He hints at Electron in the end, but I think the real blame lies on React which has become standard in the past five years. Nobody has any fucking idea what’s going on in their react projects . I work with incredibly bright people and not a single one can explain accurately what happens when you press a button. On the way to solving UI consistency it actually made it impossible for anyone to reason about what’s happe…

>I’m really looking forward to whatever next thing becomes popular and replaces this shit show.

I'm with you, but motivation to really learn a system tanks when there's something else on the horizon. And what happens when new-thing appears really great for the first 1-2 years, but goes downhill and we're back to asking for its replacement only 5 years after its release? That tells me we're still chasing 'new', but instead of a positive 'new', it's a negative one.

This was also reinforced constantly by people claiming you'll be unemployable if you aren't riding the 'new' wave or doing X amount of things in your spare time.

It's a natural consequence of an industry that moves quickly. If we want a more stable bedrock, we MUST slow down.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#138

Post by qwertygerty »

It appears to me that much of your complaint is based on the flawed assumption that the software "industry" is filled with engineers. ("Industry" because in software what appears to be production of something new, is really just a re-invention or re-creation of what's been done before - and unfortunately rarely an improvement)

For example, how many authors on medium proclaim themselves "Senior Software Engineers" but when you dig find they've got maybe 5 years experience doing web development, with no CS or engineering education. Maybe stuff like a 36hr "Web Development Bootcamp". Do people really not understand the definition of an engineer anymore?

From there they progress into the deeper parts of software. And create the atrocities to be found in the npm registry, which become dependencies of dependencies of dependencies that results in nightmares everytime one needs to navigate to a website.

If it would've been possible to see the background and education of the numerous critics here, what may we find? If I (the developer as described by the OP) am surrounded by people like me, and the world filled with people who think like me, and create things at a similar cognitive level as my peers, would I not misjudge the collective level of quality that I perceive to be acceptable? Smells like confirmation bias to me? Maybe a few others. Dunning-Kruger anyone?

In their defense, the marketing campaigns created by large corporations to turn the supply-demand (cost of employment) of employees in their favor, has I think been a big part of the problem. First the programmers, then the "Data Scientists", etc - the amount of disappointment and student debt being created as these people eventually realise they've been sold something that they're not suited for!

If we cannot critically look at our industry and admit our flaws, we cannot move forward as a collective.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#139

Post by [deleted] »

shiftless wrote: post #12
overgard wrote: post #9

I 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…

But what real enhancements does Windows 10 provide, which couldn't have simply been done as patches to Windows 7, keeping the same main structure and layout and overall design, but just continually improving it, the way Henry Ford did with the Model T for 20+ years? For that matter, one could for example take the Windows NT 4.0 source code, add in drivers for the necessary hardware, fix boot code, linking, etc to be…

[deleted]

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#140

Post by _trampeltier »

It's not just the problem with large and slow today. There are also these dark patterns everywhere special in Android. Even local thing do not work, if there is a network connection, but connections for ex. to Google are not allowed. For ex. the standard Android "Photos" App does not always show you the newest pictures, if the network blocks Google. Also you can't share something to another App if you have a network connection, but Google is blocked. If you switch off the network complete on the phone, everything is working again.
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