I remember the 90s when both mac and windows crashed on a daily basis. When was the last time you saw a legitimate BSOD that didn’t involve hardware failure? When was the last time you had to reset the PRAM on your mac just to get it to boot?
Is software getting worse?
Submitted 1 year ago by canpolat@programming.dev to programming@programming.dev
Comments
mrkite@programming.dev 1 year ago
pkulak@beehaw.org 1 year ago
Kernels have gotten better. Professional tools have gotten better. Everything on Linux has gotten better. Compilers and drivers too.
Everything else is built by the lowest bidder and is absolute garbage. And unfortunately, it’s what most people interact with all day long.
Noughmad@programming.dev 1 year ago
Eh.
This “everything else” are stuff that previously didn’t even exist. There used to be only professional tools and a few games, now you have an app (or multiple apps) for everything.
And I’ll take a garbage program over one that doesn’t exist.
interolivary@beehaw.org 1 year ago
Everything is getting worse as companies are exclusively trying to squeeze more money out of everyone rather than build good products or services. Everything is done by fewer more overworked workers, with shitter components and features that are designed to extract money out of you rather than be useful or “good” (my favorite example is BMW’s subscription based bench warmers.)
zygo_histo_morpheus@programming.dev 1 year ago
I think that there are many potential causes, but I would like to add monopolization to the list.
Usually, a bad release spelled the demise of a company, because release times were so long that competitors could take advantage of a bad software release.
People aren’t going to switch from windows because they release something bad or buggy, in that case it would already be dead. Windows isn’t technically a monopoly, but they have a lot of inertia and there are many programs that only run on windows that people depend on. There is perhaps a limit to how bad windows can be before people abandon it en masse, but they can get away with a lot. The tech world is full of different companies and programs that are in monopolistic-ish positions.
lasagna@programming.dev 1 year ago
Is some software getting worse?
Fixed for ya.
philm@programming.dev 1 year ago
Is most software getting worse?
Fixed for ya.
lasagna@programming.dev 1 year ago
I wouldn’t know. I only use some software.
balp@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It seems to me that the author doesn’t remember all the struggles we had back then with bugs and features not working. And masses of needed functionality that never got skipped into the hands of users. It also strikes me that maybe there is a bit of nostalgia, just a bit of reluctance to change his ways. He found a workflow around the missing functionality that might be blocking for others and he has a harder time adjusting to the new functionality. A bit like my father that refused to change his workflow, to make images for webpages (all static) he used for different Amiga programs because one could scale the images, one could edit them add lines and stuff, one for helping him make image maps, and they one so they could be converted to jpg/png as anim files used by everything else on the amiga didn’t work well on the internet. Bug testing back then was awful, we never had time to catch any issues but the biggest. The time plan for the release was fixed years ahead, the functionality that was needed was fixed years ahead. All the needed time for testing was eaten up by the developers working into the final skip to customers, trying to make the software actually run. It wasn’t uncommon for test teams trying to cramp months of eating into a weekend to have the software skipped on Monday morning. Well including masses of needed bug fixes during that weekend that no one knew what code each issue was actually tested on. Remember that software version control system was almost not used, there was no CI build system all all software was built on some random developers workstation. Maybe, with some additional changes for his or her convenience. No software development has come a long way since the 90s. A very long way!
canpolat@programming.dev 1 year ago
I no longer look forward to updates.
[…]
It seems to me that some software is actually getting worse, and that this is a more recent trend.
[…]
Why does this happen? I don’t know, but my own bias suggests that it’s because there’s less focus on regression testing. Many of the problems I see look like regression bugs to me. A good engineering team could have caught them with automated regression tests, but these days, it seems as though many teams rely on releasing often and then letting users do the testing.The problem with that approach, however, is that if you don’t have good automated tests, fixing one regression may resurrect another.
Every time I see a new update, I think: “I wonder what will break after this update” and postpone them as much as I can. Software updates shouldn’t cause anxiety. But they do these days…
huntrss@feddit.de 1 year ago
They used to cause anxiety in the past as well. But there was a window where - at least I - didn’t fear them. Main reason why I still think they are necessary are security patches. But I do fear updates due to their tendency in breaking things.
thingsiplay@kbin.social 1 year ago
@canpolat The article is written from the perspective of a Windows user. I'm not surprised. Software as a whole does not get worse; there are some software which get worse, and some technology getting in the way. And then there is software which get better, not worse too. If you cherry pick, then you can prove any point you want to proven right; especially on a very wide range of topics like software.
pennomi@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yeah this article is definitely suffering from a lot of biases in its logic. First off, they are cherry-picking, but there’s also survivorship bias in there.
For an obvious counter example, look at Blender. It’s gotten amazingly good even though it’s gotten more complex over the last 10 years or so.
canpolat@programming.dev 1 year ago
I’m not sure it’s that simple, really. And I definitely don’t think this is limited to Windows. I agree with other comments that this is mostly related to complexity. The more complex the domain the more difficult it is to implement/maintain a good solution. Delivering the new shiny feature is more exciting for all people (product management, development, users, etc.) than to fix bugs. And if you don’t have the resources/maturity to keep technical debt under control, the software quality will suffer over time. Free software may be the exception here as profit is not always the primary concern.
thingsiplay@kbin.social 1 year ago
@canpolat My point was not being limited to Windows, but more that his view is limited to DOS/Windows world, but making general judgements about software. And because Windows and it's eco system of applications he listed gets worse, he extrapolates this to all software.
Let's look at Linux, which is probably the biggest software ever and used on every possible way one can imagine. It got better and better, even though it's extremely big and has a lot of complexity to it and does not want to break compatibility if possible. But I am not saying all software is like that. That's my point. Some software get better, some get worse.
thisisnotgoingwell@programming.dev 1 year ago
I read it the same way… Don’t use Windows if you want a stable work environment.
jadero@programming.dev 1 year ago
I have two hypotheses for why some kinds of software grow worse over time. They are not mutually exclusive and, in fact, may both be at work in some cases.
Software has transitioned from merely complex to chaotic. That is, there is so much going on within a piece of software and its interactions with other pieces of software, including the operating system itself, that the mathematics of chaos are often more applicable than logic. In a chaotic system, everything from seemingly trivial differences between two ostensibly identical chips to the order in which software is installed, updated, and executed has an effect on the operating environment, producing unpredictable outcomes. I started thinking about the systems I was using with this in mind sometime in the early 2000s.
The “masters” in the field are not paying enough attention to the “apprentices” and "journeymen. Put another way, there are too many programmers like me left unsupervised. I couldn’t have had a successful career without tools like Visual Basic and Access, the masterful documentation and tutorials they came with, and the wisdom to make sure I was never in a position where my software might have more than a dozen users at a time at any one site. Now we have people who don’t know enough to use one selection to limit the options for the next selection juggling different software and frameworks trying to work in teams to do the bidding of someone who can barely type. And the end result is supposed to be used by thousands of people on all manner of equipment and network connections.
One reason that open source software seems more reliable is that people like me, even if we think we can contribute, are mostly dissuaded by the very complexity of the process. The few of us who do navigate the system to make a contribution have our offerings carefully scrutinized before acceptance.
Another reason that open source software seems more reliable is that most of it is aimed at those with expertise or desiring expertise. At least in my experience, that cohort is much more tolerant of those things that more casual users find frustrating.
dog@suppo.fi 1 year ago
Yes, software is getting worse, as education and corporate are getting worse.
Where employees needed to know what they actually were doing in the past, now is mostly auto-filled by IDE’s and languages that target other languages, so employees need to know less and less fundamentals.
Which in turn means when a low-level error occurs, either no one knows how to fix it, or the corporate refuses to hire someone who knows how to fix it because they’re “over-qualified”, and therefore would “cost them too much”.
witx@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Depending on the points I can see it with education and even with things like chatgpt, but IDEs? Ah this is a new one. How do IDEs just fill code for programmers? What’s next? programmers use chairs that are too comfortable for them?
IDEs have boosted significantly programmers productivity.
thingsiplay@kbin.social 1 year ago
@canpolat The article is written from the perspective of a Windows user. I'm not surprised. Software as a whole does not get worse; there are some software which get worse, and some technology getting in the way. And then there is software which get better, not worse too. If you cherry pick, then you can prove any point you want to proven right; especially on a very wide range of topics like software.
JoeKrogan@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Not FOSS but commercial software is. The apps just get more bloated and want to suck even more data with each update. Then there is the sites that have hundreds of trackers and third party cookies from everywhere and need a 1gb to display 🙄. OK maybe not 1gb but you get the gist.
Dasnap@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Electron apps created with React can definitely push the boundaries of what ‘acceptable’ memory usage is.
lysdexic@programming.dev 1 year ago
I have a pet theory that webview-based apps are popular only because currently there is absolutely no usable multiplatform desktop GUI framework. Therefore, developers have to resort to the one thing that works: load a webpage in a web browser.
Even React Native feels like a kludge in a way it converts React components to UI components.
Draghetta@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Yep totally unheard of for foss software to get worse. Gnome 3 and kde 4 for example were universally acclaimed.
I think that the post author just neglects that software has become mindblowingly complex compared to the days of yore, if you put together all the features of netscape + win 3.11 + wordperfect + whatever other thing they were using in the 90s at any given point you don’t get 10% of the complexity of a contemporary productivity app (say outlook) let alone a full operating system.
It’s clear that the more complex something is the more things can break. It’s like complaining that F16s are worse than consumer 40€ drones because the former require maintenance every few hours of flight while the latter don’t.
MagicShel@programming.dev 1 year ago
But if all you need is a drone and ask anyone makes is an F-16, that is a shitty mismatch. I don’t need an outlook that does all that shit 1 I just need to check my email, or will last set up a filter to send everything to the trash.
I don’t need teams to do document management, I just need to chat with my team. I’ll resend a document if it is needed for any reason. Companies are adding useless bloat to all of these things and then breaking the core functionality because they’ve made things hard. This is not progress.