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Software Disenchantment (2018)

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Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#211

Post by Wowfunhappy »

cortesoft wrote: post #29

He seems to make a contradictory point... he complains: > iOS 11 dropped support for 32-bit apps. That means if the developer isn’t around at the time of the iOS 11 release or isn’t willing to go back and update a once-perfectly-fine app, chances are you won’t be seeing their app ever again. but then he also says: > To have a healthy ecosystem you need to go back and revisit. You need to occasionally throw stuff away…

And yet at the time of its release, iOS 11 was the most buggy version in recent memory. (This record has since been beaten by iOS 13.)

I don't quite know what's going on inside Apple, but it doesn't feel like they're choosing which features to remove in a particularly thoughtful way.

---

Twenty years ago, Apple's flagship platform was called Mac OS (Mac OS ≠ macOS), and it sucked beyond repair. So Apple shifted to a completely different platform, which they dubbed Mac OS X. A slow and clunky virtualization layer was added for running "classic" Mac OS software, but it was built to be temporary, not a normal means of operation.

For anyone invested in the Mac OS platform at the time, this must have really sucked. But what's important is that Apple made the transition once! They realized that a clean break was essential, and they did it, and we've been on OS X ever since. There's a 16-year-old OS X app called Audio Slicer which I still use regularly in High Sierra. It would break if I updated to Catalina, but, therein lies my problem with today's Apple.

If you really need to make a clean break, fine, go ahead! It will be painful, but we'd best get it over with.

But that shouldn't happen more than once every couple decades, and even less as we get collectively more experienced at writing software.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#212

Post by ratww »

buboard wrote: post #194
TeMPOraL wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think my favourite fact(oid) to point out here would be that the React model is essentially the same thing as the good ol' Windows GUI model. The good ol' 1980s Windows, though perhaps slightly more convenient for developers. See [0]. I think it's good to keep that in mind as a reference point. -- https://www.bitquabit.com/post/the-more-things-change/

if webdev is going to go through all the iterations of GUI development ... oh boy , there are decades of frameworks ahead

It's just the underlying model that is similar, but React is pretty good at abstracting all that (unlike Win32).

When it comes to developer experience I'd say that React and company are ahead of most desktop UI technologies, and has inspired others (Flutter, SwiftUI).

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#213

Post by xorand »

Programming is now a bureaucracy.

[1] "In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle%27s_...

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#214

Post by Wowfunhappy »

johnr2 wrote: post #35

One thing nobody seems to mention is the environmental cost of inefficient software. All those wasted CPU cycles consume electricity. A single laptop or phone on it's own is insignificant, but there are billions of them. Combine that with the energy wasted shovelling unnecessary crap around the internet, and it adds up to a big CO2 problem that nobody talks about.

It's much worse than that: what is the environmental cost of buying a new phone because Slack runs too slowly on your old one?

The things I'm doing on my phone today are not fundamentally different than what I was doing ten years ago. And yet, I had to buy a new phone.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#215

Post by city41 »

neilalexander wrote: post #187
city41 wrote: post #58

This article really resonates with me. But my biggest complaint is everything is _so_ buggy! I won't name any names, but I find many major pieces of software from large, well known companies are just riddled with bugs. I also feel like you almost need to be a programmer to think of workarounds "hmm, ok, so clearly it's in a bad state. If I had coded this, what boundaries would likely cause a complete refresh?" My wif…

I'll gladly name names. Apple have totally forgotten how to test and assure software against what appear to be even stupid bugs. macOS Catalina has been fraught with issues ranging from the minor to the ridiculous. Clearly nobody even bothered to test whether the Touch Bar "Spaces" mode on the MacBook Pro 16" actually works properly before shipping the thing. Software updates sometimes just stop downloading midway th…

Apple is one company I've been willing to name as it's extremely frustrating to have such a sub par experience with such expensive products. I used to be a huge Apple fan, and now I no longer use any Apple products. I've never used Catalina, but iOS is unbelievably buggy now so I'm not surprised.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#216

Post by TeMPOraL »

coldtea wrote: post #62

> You’ve probably heard this mantra: “Programmer time is more expensive than computer time.” What it means basically is that we’re wasting computers at an unprecedented scale. Would you buy a car if it eats 100 liters per 100 kilometers? How about 1000 liters? With computers, we do that all the time. The argument is incomplete. The correct question (to maintain the analogy) is: "Would you buy a car if it eats 1000 li…

It's all fine until - as it often is - we want to do that task more often. Any task worth doing once is likely worth doing more than once; any task worth doing across many people is likely to be worth outsourcing to a business focused on it.

Using a real example: in a certain company that wife worked in, there was a task that - every couple of days - would be repeatedly done by multiple office workers for several hours. I was visiting that place once, and since I had to wait for my wife, I was asked to give them a hand with that task. Growing frustrated, I very quickly located a hidden option for batch processing they didn't know anything about. It solved the entire task in couple of minutes. By finding that option, I freed several man-days a month for that company. Time that can be used for other tasks (or even goofing off).

This example sticks with me because these days, a lot of work is done in front of computers, and every inefficiency there removes productivity from the economy. The way I see it, if you're developing software, and there is a possibility that that software will end up being used by someone in their job, you owe it to them to make it efficient; by ignoring efficiency, you'll be robbing such people of their life and mental health, and their employers of potential profit.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#217

Post by buzzkillington »

rogerdb wrote: post #20

> Would you buy a car if it eats 100 liters per 100 kilometers? How about 1000 liters? I think the analogy here is backwards. The better question is "how much would you prioritize a car that used only 0.05 liters per 100km over one that used 0.5? What about one that used only 0.005L?". I'd say that at that point, other factors like comfort, performance, base price, etc. become (relatively) much more important. If bas…

RTFA:

>And build times? Nobody thinks compiler that works minutes or even hours is a problem. What happened to “programmer’s time is more important”? Almost all compilers, pre- and post-processors add significant, sometimes disastrous time tax to your build without providing proportionally substantial benefits.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#218

Post by zamadatix »

syntheticnature wrote: post #177

Some valid and useful points wrapped up in a pile of failure to do even trivial research (e.g. Google Play Services isn't what the author thinks, the iOS 'nothing changed' hand-wave) and the sensibility of someone walking around an art show saying "I could do that, better." The author could bear introduction to Chesteron's Fence, if nothing else, and a review of their apparent GitHub profile points to, perhaps, needi…

I caught the play services as well but rather than try to take down the article for not being perfect I've been trying to think about what it's talking about.

I don't think there is anything mentioned in the article that is not realistic, including a 1 second boot time on a phone that you bring up. The only reason we can't get a phone with a static hardware configuration to boot in a second is because that's not what we've been optimizing phones for. LinuxBoot is a great example of how the time it takes to boot is purely about how much time we assign people to optimizing it not some laws of physics that require servers to take 7 minutes to boot.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#219

Post by Wowfunhappy »

coldtea wrote: post #78

> And then there’s bloat. Web apps could open up to 10 times faster if you just simply blocked all ads. Google begs everyone to stop shooting themselves in the foot with the AMP initiative—a technology solution to a problem that doesn’t need any technology, just a little bit of common sense. If you remove bloat, the web becomes crazy fast. How smart do you have to be to understand that? If you "simply blocked all ads…

> If you "simply blocked all ads" the people making the pages wouldn't have the income which they maintain the pages with.

I agree with regards to ads specifically; that's why I don't use an ad blocker.

But the problem is so much greater than ads. Ads aren't what's slowing down the new gmail, or Slack.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#220

Post by phillipcarter »

A coworker of mine explained his belief that professional software development is an inherently economic activity. This was clarified by saying that the amount of imperfections, performance problems, and bugs in a piece of software is not reflective of the software nor its writers, but what most end users ultimately care about.

Whenever I read posts like Software Disenchantment, I find myself agreeing with that philosophy. In other words, it’s probably by design. Of course this doesn’t account for the enormous waste of time and money that occurs during software development, but that doesn’t really affect my feelings on the matter.

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