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I think Jonathan Blow gave his “Preventing the Collapse of Civilization” talk (much stronger treatment of the subject matter) around that time, also about how software quality was only going down
I don't want to sound too dismissive, but all these arguments have been brought up time and again. The move from assembler to high level languages. The introduction of OOP. Component architecture / COM / CORBA / etc. The development of the web browser. The introduction of Java. 2018 isn't "the start of the decline", it's just another data point on a line that leads from, y'know, Elite 8-bit on a single tape in a few…
This is partly related to the explosion of new developers entering the industry, coupled with the classic "move fast and break things" mentality, and further exacerbated by the current "AI" wave. Junior developers don't have a clear path at becoming senior developers anymore. Most of them will overly rely on "AI" tools due to market pressure to deliver, stunting their growth. They will never learn how to troubleshoot, fix, and avoid introducing issues in the first place. They will never gain insight, instincts, understanding, and experience, beyond what is acquired by running "AI" tools in a loop. Of course, some will use these tools for actually learning and becoming better developers, but I reckon that most won't.
So the downward trend in quality will only continue, until the public is so dissatisfied with the state of the industry that it causes another crash similar to the one in 1983. This might happen at the same time as the "AI" bubble pop, or they might be separate events.
Just false nostalgia memory. 20 years ago things werent any better. Software didn't consume gigabytes of ram because there was no gigabytes of ram to consume.
It's from 1995 and laments that computers need megabytes of memory for what used to work in kilobytes.
Just false nostalgia memory. 20 years ago things werent any better. Software didn't consume gigabytes of ram because there was no gigabytes of ram to consume.
One could easily imagine the analogy, e. g. the amount of commercial software (in critical infrastructure) that "leaked kBytes and MBytes of memory", as well as embarassing "Computer Science 101 error handling" fuck-ups of the day with billion dollar consequences, but I believe you got it surrounded...
Therac-25?
Anyone?
Bueller? Bueller?
I don't want to sound too dismissive, but all these arguments have been brought up time and again. The move from assembler to high level languages. The introduction of OOP. Component architecture / COM / CORBA / etc. The development of the web browser. The introduction of Java. 2018 isn't "the start of the decline", it's just another data point on a line that leads from, y'know, Elite 8-bit on a single tape in a few…
Agile management methods set up a non-existent release method called "waterfall" as a straw man, where software isn't released until it works, practically eliminating technical debt. I'm hoping someone fleshes it out into a real management method. I'm not convinced this wasn't the plan in the first place, considering that the author of Cunningham's law, that "The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer." was a co-signer of the Agile manifest.
It'll take a lot of work at first, especially considering how industry-wide the technical debt is (see also: https://xkcd.com/2030/), but once done, having release-it-and-forget-it quality software would be a game changer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you plot the line it's probably still curving up and I'm not clear at which point (if ever) it would start bending the other way. I suspect when Moore‘s law ends and we cannot build substantially faster machines anymore.
But the machines aren't really "faster" in clock speed— for a long time now the gains have been in better and more local caching + parallelism at both the core and instruction level.
Which most programs don't take advantage of.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I can see this can be an irritating rhetorical device. It implies that the reader already has a certain judgement or explanation, and makes a straw man in order to turn around and then argue against it, throwing nuance out the window.
It’s not nuance, it’s intellectual dishonesty.
Unrelated but my current AI text flag is the use of "It's not X. It's Y." It's become so repetitive recently. Examples from this post alone: 1. "This isn't about AI. The quality crisis started years before ChatGPT existed." 2. "The degradation isn't gradual—it's exponential." 3. "These aren't feature requirements. They're memory leaks that nobody bothered to fix." 4. "This wasn't sophisticated. This was Computer Scie…
Hes right that cloudstike was terrible incompetence but I find it hard to worry about the memory leak stats. If lots of software leaks memory these days its because people have accepted that and its probably not economic to trace and fox those bugs. A lot of software is disposable or transient these days, like an app you only use twice a month
Everyone else in this thread is missing that crowdstrike level bug would have taken down the company in the past. I had a friend practically scream at his C level management after the crowdstrike bug that it should be ripped out because it was making the company less safe. They were deaf to all arguments. Why? Insurance mandated crowdstrike. Still. Even now. This isnt really about software it is about a concentration…
Agree, but it's always been this way. Oracle, everything IBM, Workday, everything Salesforce, Windows before XP.
Most software is its own little monopoly. Yes, you could ditch Teams for Zoom but is it really the same?
It's not like buying a sedan where there are literally 20+ identical options in the market that can be ranked by hard metrics such as mileage and reliability.
Just false nostalgia memory. 20 years ago things werent any better. Software didn't consume gigabytes of ram because there was no gigabytes of ram to consume.