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The rise of industrial software

chrisloy.dev

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Re: The rise of industrial software

#4

Post by bolangi »

This thought-provoking essay does not consider one crucial aspect of software: the cost of a user developing a facility with a given software product. Historically monopolistic software producers can force these costs to be borne because the user has no alternative to upgrading to the latest version of, for example, Windows, or gmail, or the latest version of the github GUI. A signficant portion of the open source / free software movement is software providing stable interfaces (including for the user) so that resources otherwise spent on compulsory retraining to use the latest version of something proprietary, can be invested in configuring existing resources to better suit the user's problem domain. For example, programs like mutt or vim, or my latest discovery, talon.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#5

Post by jamesdhutton »

philipallstar wrote: post #3

These damn articles. Software moved into an industrial revolution when you could write in a high level language, and not in assembly. This has already happened .

The article makes this very point. From the article: “software has been industrialising for a long time: through reusable components (open source code), portability (containerisation, the cloud), democratisation (low-code / no-code tools), interoperability (API standards, package managers) and many other ways”

Re: The rise of industrial software

#6

Post by baq »

philipallstar wrote: post #3

These damn articles. Software moved into an industrial revolution when you could write in a high level language, and not in assembly. This has already happened .

You either see what codex and opus are capable of and extrapolate the trendline or you don’t; the author clearly saw and extrapolated.

Not that I disagree: I’m on record agreeing with the article months ago. Folks in labs probably seen it coming for years.

Yes we’ve seen major improvements in software development velocity - libraries, OSes, containers, portable bytecodes - but I’m afraid we’ve seen nothing yet. Claude Code and Codex are just glimpses into the future.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#7

Post by motbus3 »

I'm not through yet but I don't know.

As a developer for almost 30 years now, if I think where most of my code went, I would say, quantitatively, to the bin.

I processed much data, dumps and logs over the years. I collected statistical information, mapped flows, created models of the things I needed to understand. And this was long before any "big data" thing.

Nothing changed with AI. I keep doing the same things, but maybe the output have colours.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#8

Post by bgwalter »

Another AI entrepreneur who writes a long article about inevitability, lists some downsides in order to remain credible but all in all just uses neurolinguistic programming on the reader so that the reader, too, will think the the "AI" revolution is inevitable.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#9

Post by Etheryte »

bolangi wrote: post #4

This thought-provoking essay does not consider one crucial aspect of software: the cost of a user developing a facility with a given software product. Historically monopolistic software producers can force these costs to be borne because the user has no alternative to upgrading to the latest version of, for example, Windows, or gmail, or the latest version of the github GUI. A signficant portion of the open source /…

I don't think the division line runs on the open-source software front here. Windows has historically offered some of the most stable APIs, meanwhile there's plenty of examples of popular open-source software with a lot of breaking changes.
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