Software Disenchantment (2018)

From a Reddit comment:

> While I do share the general sentiment, I do feel the need to point out that this exact page, a blog entry consisting mostly of just text, is also half the size of Windows 95 on my computer and includes 6MB of javascript, which is more code than there was in Linux 1.0. Linux at that point already contained drivers for various network interface controllers, hard drives, tape drives, disk drives, audio devices, user input devices and serial devices, 5 or 6 different filesystems, implementations of TCP, UDP, ICMP, IP, ARP, Ethernet and Unix Domain Sockets, a full software implementation of IEEE754 a MIDI sequencer/synthesizer and lots of other things.

>If you want to call people out, start with yourself. The web does not have to be like this, and in fact it is possible in 2018 to even have a website that does not include Google Analytics.

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9go8ul/comment...

This is also one of my pet peeves. It's easier than ever to collect this data and analyse it. Unfortunately, most of our clients are doing neither, or they are collecting the logs but carefully ignoring them.

I've lost count of the number of monitoring systems I've opened up just to see a wall of red tapering off to orange after scrolling a couple of screens further down.

At times like this I like to point out that "Red is the bad colour". I generally get a wide-eyed uncomprehending look followed by any one of a litany of excuses:

- I though it was the other team's responsibility

- It's not in my job description

- I just look after the infrastructure

- I just look after the software

- I'm just a manager, I'm not technical

- I'm just a tech, it's management's responsibility

Unfortunately, as a consultant I can't force anyone to do anything, and I'm fairly certain that the reports I write that are peppered with fun phrases such as "catastrophic risk of data corruption", "criminally negligent", etc... are printed out only so that they can be used as a convenient place to scribble some notes before being thrown in the paper recycling bin.

Remember the "HealthCare.gov" fiasco in 2013? [1] Something like 1% of the interested users managed to get through to the site, which cost $200M to develop. I remember the Obama got a bunch of top guys from various large IT firms to come help out, and the guy from Google had an amazing talk a couple of months later about what he found.

The takeaway message for me was that the Google guy's opinion was that the root cause of the failure was simply that: "Nobody was responsible for the overall outcome". That is, the work was siloed, and every group, contractor, or vendor was responsible only for their own individual "stove-pipe". Individually each component was all "green lights", but in aggregate it was terrible.

I see this a lot with over-engineered "n-tier" applications. A hundred brand new servers that are slow as molasses with just ten UAT users, let alone production load. The excuses are unbelievable, and nobody pays attention to the simple unalterable fact that this is TEN SERVERS PER USER and it's STILL SLOW!

People ignore the latency costs of firewalls, as one example. Nobody knows about VMware's "latency sensitivity tuning" option, which is a turbo button for load balancers and service bus VMs. I've seen many environments where ACPI deep-sleep states are left on, and hence 80% of the CPU cores are off and the other 20% are running at 1 GHz! Then they buy more servers, reducing the average load further and simply end up with even more CPU cores powered off permanently.

It would be hilarious of it wasn't your money they were wasting...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov#Issues_during_l...

Free markets hate unchanging software. Software churn generates activity and revenue, and the basic goal of the game is to be the one controlling the change. Change is good when you have your hands on the knobs and levers, bad when someone else does. Organizations try to steer their users away from having dependencies on changes that they don't control. "You're still using some of XYZ Corp's tools along with ABC's suite? In the upcoming release, ABC we will help you drop that XYZ stuff ..."

It's very hard for me to get away from C# because it's just so crazy productive. The tooling is fanstastic and the runtime performance is more than good enough.

One thing I found was that surprisingly the C# code I write outperforms the C++ code I used to write at equal development times.

I was good at C++, but the language has so many footguns and in general is so slow to develop in that I would stick to "simple" and straightforward solutions. I avoided multi-threading like the plague because it was just so hard to get right.

Meanwhile in C# it's just so easy to sprinkle a little bit of multithreading into almost any application (even command-line tools) that I do it "just because". Even if the single-threaded performance is not-so-great, the end result is often much better.

Similarly, it's easy to apply complex algorithms or switch between a few variants until something works well. In C++ or even Rust, the strict ownership semantics makes some algorithm changes require wholesale changes to the rest of the program, making this kind of experimentation a no-go.

The thing that blows my mind is the "modern" approach to programming that seems to be mostly young people pretending that Java or C# just don't exist.

Have you seen what JavaScript and Python people call "easy?" I saw a page describing a REST API based on JSON where they basically had thousands of functions with no documentation, no schema, and no typed return values. It was all "Just look at what the website JS does and reverse engineer it! It's so easy!"

I was flabbergasted. In Visual Studio I can literally just paste a WSDL URL into a form and it'll auto-generate a 100K-line client with async methods and strongly-typed parameters and return values in like... a second. Ditto for Linq-2-SQL or similar frameworks.

> Web pages ask you to refresh if anything goes wrong. Who has time to figure out what happened?

I feel like this is a feature, not a bug of software dev. The fact that you can push updates out so instantaneously allows you to work incredibly incrementally. You can make barely functional, inefficient things (shortcut hacks) just to make sure that your product is something that people actually use before focusing on optimization. If users are willing to put in the extra work to "refresh" the page, then certainly there's some real problem you are solving.