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"I used to have the illusion that software was supposed to get better over time." Well there you go. That's the author's problem. He's caught up in an all-too-
by joesmo 10y ago
"I used to have the illusion that software was supposed to get better over time."
Well there you go. That's the author's problem. He's caught up in an all-too-common delusion. Of course software gets worse with time. The only counterexample I have is Apache and some CLI tools. I literally cannot think of any other software that has not declined significantly given enough time and features. Whether the product manager wants to add some stupid little widget users will hate, the designer wants to redesign a perfectly good UI into a monstrosity, or the programmer wants to rewrite perfectly good code into a pile of bugs, it is almost a law of nature that software quality will degrade. You can even trace the causes of the author's gripes to one of the above reasons.
- slgeorge 10y agoYeah, I feel this is often so true, perhaps I'm a little less pessimistic, but not much. The best way I'd visualise it for FOSS is that it's sort of an oscillating walk upwards (over time) to improvement - though any set of changes could set you back or forward. Then, the big thing that hits (and where you're "decline significantly") happens is that there's some a) change of fashion (lets re-do it with trendy new language/framework etc), b) change contributors which leads to "lets do version 3.0" or the darn thing dies out! I've often wondered why the 'classics' such as CLI tools seem to be resistant to this. I suspect that over time users just learn to live with the "bugs" and don't expect any further changes: from a time when "being 1.0" meant it was complete!