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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?

#451

Post by arm32 »

jason_oster wrote: post #416
CivBase wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say "coding" has been solved, but that was never the bottleneck. Coding is cheap. It has been for a long time. Ten years ago my company was outsorcing all its coding to the cheapest people they could find in India. But most of these people can't solve problems. They can't even identify problems, much less design solutions. Code is a liability. You want as little as you can to solve the problems you actually have.…

Coding is anything but cheap. You speak like someone who has completely forgotten how difficult it was to learn everything you now know by heart.

> You speak like someone who has completely forgotten how difficult it was to learn everything you now know by heart.

Well said.

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

#452

Post by BobbyTables2 »

The issue was never coding.

Today, developers assemble a Tower of Babel built of libraries they do not understand. Those libraries were largely built the same way.

There is “no value” in a company maintaining their own purpose-optimized HTTP client, database, GUI framework, or anything else.

Each layer adds features but subtle crappiness in the details not understood.

I shudder to think how many string libraries end up in a modern system…

“Practical” solutions like “this WXYZ fails 5%” of the time, let’s add a retry loop. Of course, this the next layer sees random failures that are hard to reproduce, so they add the same.

At some point our modern supercomputers are repeating millions of operations because of a stupid bug. The user just sees a sluggish app and gets annoyed.

We could write simple, understandable, efficient software that is a joy to ship and use. Unfortunately that doesn’t add value so we are extremely careful to never waste resources on such!

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

#453

Post by greenlimetea »

As crazy as it sounds, code quality != software quality.

It turns out that the lower the barrier to creating "high quality" code is, the worse the software is on average.

Who remembers the Photoshop lens flare?

It's not that the effect sucked - it did lens flare perfectly. But who used it sucked.

Instagram and the Nashville filter - "we're all photographers now"

Code quality not equaling software quality gets at the fun part of the modern AI-labor debate. Where does talent and efficacy really reside in terms of software? Surely not in the (apparently unworthy?) mind of a human? Surely it can be extracted, distilled, automated – liberated! - unto a reactive web interface for some middle manager to invoke (at some expense to some account this folk loses zero sleep over), because it is after all this flimsy, transferrable - not worthless! Not worthless! I have a stock portfolio to maintain for God's sake. But mine. Nonetheless.

Code quality doesn't equal software quality.

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

#454

Post by BobbyTables2 »

hibikir wrote: post #3

A lot of the product misses come from large product teams where nobody owns anything, and where there's minimal internal goal alignment. I know that, at work, what I am incentivized to do has nothing to do with what I consider the most important work I could do.... and I also know that the maze I would have to cross to be allowed to do the better work is just not worth it. The smaller the org, the better the chances…

In large orgs, each team spends a ridiculous amount of effort adding the “glue” logic to work around design/architectural issues with the other teams’ products they interface with.

Neither one really understands the other’s component.

Cooperation is almost impossible since such would derail one project manager’s unrealistic schedule and demean their authority.

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

#456

Post by sebmellen »

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #452

The issue was never coding. Today, developers assemble a Tower of Babel built of libraries they do not understand. Those libraries were largely built the same way. There is “no value” in a company maintaining their own purpose-optimized HTTP client, database, GUI framework, or anything else. Each layer adds features but subtle crappiness in the details not understood. I shudder to think how many string libraries end…

While I empathize with this view in principle, I believe that all organic systems eventually devolve into deep and rather chaotic complexity as they become more advanced. Biology is in many ways extremely inefficient, but it is also very error-tolerant because it has so many retry and error-correcting mechanisms.

And humans possess nowhere near as gifted a talent as God or natural selection or whatever you believe drives the natural world. So it’s to be expected that the systems we produce will be much more buggy than biology! It’s kind of futile to imagine it could happen any other way… we are just not that good.

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

#457

Post by MiddleEndian »

cmiller1 wrote: post #143
frameset wrote: post #37

> 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 wh…

I think this is less a "macOS lacks the feature to prevent focus stealing" and more they never even imagined the scenario where it takes time for the app to open. Instead of even considering that a user may add inputs while waiting for launch, potentially signaling that they are no longer requesting focus from the program they clicked on, they simply designed for the optimistic case where there never IS time for the…

Having owned a good number of Macs and one hackintosh in the past, that would be very bizarre assumption to overlook. App icons bouncing while something loaded was never a rare thing.

IMO, nothing should ever steal my keyboard focus. As soon as I've typed a single character, whatever happened before, too late for you.

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

#458

Post by MiddleEndian »

eviks wrote: post #75
frameset wrote: post #37

> 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 wh…

How would that global app ban help? You do want the application to steal focus when necessary. It's just in this case the user has made the decision to not wait for startup and switch to another app. Aggravating step - he was typing. Is this workflow part of the Kwin settings? It's not interrupting typing part of the settings?

>You do want the application to steal focus when necessary

No I don't. We recently switched to Zoom at work. Meeting notifications steal my focus (Windows 11 device) and it's fucking terrible. Nothing should ever steal focus.

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

#459

Post by CivBase »

jason_oster wrote: post #416
CivBase wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say "coding" has been solved, but that was never the bottleneck. Coding is cheap. It has been for a long time. Ten years ago my company was outsorcing all its coding to the cheapest people they could find in India. But most of these people can't solve problems. They can't even identify problems, much less design solutions. Code is a liability. You want as little as you can to solve the problems you actually have.…

Coding is anything but cheap. You speak like someone who has completely forgotten how difficult it was to learn everything you now know by heart.

Coding litterally is cheap. We outsource it for wages that you'd expect of a bottom-level fast food employee. We've been doing that for many years.

It doesn't take a 4 year education to learn how to use loops, functions, and basic data structures. Most of you could probably code by the end of your fresan year of college. Many probably learned at least some coding before college.

I've learned plenty since those days. I can code much faster now than I used to - in the same way an accountant is probably faster at mental math than they once were. But an accountant's value isn't in how fast they can crunch numbers. In the same way, a software engineer's value isn't in how fast they can code.

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

#460

Post by impulser_ »

I think people just think it getting worst because you use software for literally everything in your life now compare to before and this means you will most likely run into bugs more often.

On top of that software has to be build with more users in mind so you are often going to get bloated software. That why enterprise software is often horrible because they have to support multiple industries that all need different types of workflows and UI.

I have been using software for decades and there has always been horrible software. Like I'm mind blown that people think human always wrote good code, and that AI is somehow worst than human code. AI writes better code then the vast majority of programmers that's a fact. Yes, including you. Yes there are certain areas of programming that it sucks at but 99% of programmer aren't writing that code.

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