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With respect, at least part of your frustration comes from the "curse of the installed base." Long-lived software with real users in any language running on an
by OliverJones 10y ago
With respect, at least part of your frustration comes from the "curse of the installed base."
Long-lived software with real users in any language running on any platform becomes complex, and picks up strange-looking appendages. Sometimes those appendages are nasty hacks, and sometimes they are well-built. But they are, in most cases, necessary to the proper functioning of the software, and responsible for its success with its users.
That's true of long-lived human work product in any discipline. Look at a municipal utility map sometime, and then consider that it is probably at least three decades out of date. That's why utilities send out "dig safe" guys to construction sites. That's why things go wrong in utility work after longtime engineers retire or die.
That being said, the capabilities in web browsers are definitely the utility company equivalent of of a pickup truck full of random bolts, pipes, wires, a shovel, a ladder, and a jackhammer. You can do many things badly with a web browser, and our ways of doing them badly have evolved over the past couple of decades.
I believe your frustration with aging web software is, in fact, a sign that web software has become generally useful to the population.
- Klathmon 10y agoIt comes back to that wonderful quote by Bjarne Stroustrup: "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses"
- goatlover 10y agoIt's apropos that the creator of C++ would say something like that. I wonder of Alan Kay, John McCarthy or Guido van Rossum would agree.
- OliverJones 10y agoJoel Spolsky (FogBugz, Stack Overflow, Trello) wrote this article half a generation ago. It's about not giving in to the temptation to start from scratch when your software is ugly. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
- aminok 10y agoIronically Firefox was produced as a result of the code created from the Netscape rewrite he criticised.
- emodendroket 10y agoWhy is that "ironic?" I don't see how it disproves his point.
- aminok 10y agoFirefox was a significant improvement over the status quo in browsers when it was released.
- emodendroket 10y agoWho's to say that Netscape wouldn't have been just as good, or even better, if they'd devoted all that time to working on it instead?
- barefootcoder 10y agoYour comment ignores my introductory paragraph. I have many years of experience working on many different mature code-bases, including (and especially) C++. I know the pain of legacy code quite well, but web seems to be a whole other ball of wax.