12 ms·

Modern software is at its worst

62 points by adito 10y ago

goalieca 10y ago
I'd prefer it if most web sites were textual. Also, disabling JavaScript can have some hilarious effects for some web pages :D
- goda90 10y ago
  Just do it in HTML(with functioning links), not a text document on gopher like this article.
- Nadya 10y ago
  I agree. Most blogs should not require Javascript to read - that includes GA. Just a little bit of styling to aid readability and you should be set. Related: motherfuckingwebsite.com & bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com
cr3ative 10y ago
Author complains of UI design degrading, later goes on to mention "(the URL is actually one line, had to split it to fit into 67 char width)". Fantastic.
- eis 10y ago
  Yea he had some very good points but that one made me chuckle.
- goda90 10y ago
  It's like he reacted to overly complicated websites by going to another extreme of making a text document on gopher. Simple HTML on www would have made his point beautifully and been functional so that I didn't have to copy paste the URL.
  - cellularmitosis 10y ago
    Philip Greenspun's site has always been my golden standard of what you can do with minimal, hand-edited HTML. http://philip.greenspun.com/writing/ http://philip.greenspun.com/writing/
    - leadingthenet 10y ago
      Is it, though? I find it extremely difficult to read paragraphs that are that wide.
      - goda90 10y ago
        You could always shrink your window.
ggasp 10y ago
Hacker News is at its worst.
elnygren 10y ago
This. I spend probably 4GB+ RAM only to send IMs to people. (I run WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack and Chrome/Facebook) The sad fact is that the general public only seems to care about the fancy buttons. And from a business standpoint, cheap software (high level langs/tools that are bad for perf) and following current design trends are more important than CPU cycles. Perhaps we'll see some kind of "back to the basics" movement in the future where UI and software becomes much more simpler.
- na85 10y ago
  There used to be little animated gifs that we'd put on our Geocities pages with flashing "thank you for not using AOL" or "don't surf and AOL" slogans. IMHO the web needs a movement akin to "nosql", but for bloated crap like JavaScript. My web browsing experience has only improved after installing noscript.
  - jasonkostempski 10y ago
    I think the world is starting down this path, this is the second link to a .txt file in my news feed today :) I've recently been longing for a way to easily filter the internet to text/plain only content, not only is there no bloat, the content tends to have actual substance. Edit: Holy smokes, the site hosting the content is what I'm talking about http://weeb.ddns.net/1/gopher http://weeb.ddns.net/1/gopher I'd still like a text/plain only Google though, I'd be willing to POST the search request for such a thing via cURL.
    - sanderjd 10y ago
      This was also the second link I followed to a text file today, both on this domain (same author?). I went through the hassle of pinch-zooming to make the first one sort-of legible on my phone, because the content (C without the stdlib) was worth it, but I immediately hit the back button on this one. I really don't understand the inclination to make things harder to use, for what purpose, nostalgia?
      - 10y ago
blauditore 10y ago
I think the main reason for worse performance is not adding unnecessary features or covering lazyness. It's due to additional complexity introduced by additional layers like VMs, sandboxes and frameworks. These things make development more fun, quicker, cheaper and easier to target more platforms. I think software wouldn't have evolved so fast if every dev was still doing manual memory management in C. Don't get me wrong, close-to-metal coding and native, fast UIs are wonderful where appropriate, but there's no sense in doing it for every small cookie bakery website.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
freehunter 10y ago
So this is just a txt file on a server... why is it completely blank when I open it? I could understand if there was a SQL database and a heavy PHP application serving requests and the system ran out of memory or Apache ran out of open connections... but it's a txt file. I could even see there being an incompatibility between my browser and the site's coding. Maybe they're using fancy new Javascript techniques or their CSS doesn't play well with Safari... but it's a txt file. I guess it's modern software at its worst: we can't even display a plaintext file in the browser reliably.
- emptyfile 10y ago
  On Vivaldi here, can't see it either :)
- iliaznk 10y ago
  macOS Sierra, Chrome, empty page.
- tjelen 10y ago
  I think the page is just down at the moment. Even when using curl it doesn't return anything.
- vbezhenar 10y ago
  http://pastebin.com/raw/fqqf06AD http://pastebin.com/raw/fqqf06AD
- eis 10y ago
  From what I understood it's actually a proxy to some gopher server. And it returns an HTML page with css etc and not just a txt file. Funny stuff.
anc84 10y ago
Archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20161129135442/http://weeb.ddns.net/0/articles/modern_software_is_at_its_worst.txt https://web.archive.org/web/20161129135442/http://weeb.ddns.... I guess this might explain why it broke: Hello there! You are currently visiting gopherspace through a proxy.
scandox 10y ago
This debate will never end. Money. It's money. Start talking to the guy who pays the pipers, not the pipers. Although, unfortunately they won't read your blog because it isn't on Facebook.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  The guy that actually pays the piper doesn't even have an opinion on stuff like this.
kelvin0 10y ago
Ah yes, the good old days: When cars had carburetors (and none of that fancy electronic stuff), maintenance was so much simpler. Cold weather sometimes got in the way of starting up, but once you were running, the joy! Using punch cards and mainframes really forced the programmer to think his solution through and optimize the hell out of it. Once in a while your cards would not get entered properly, but in the end this made you a better programmer even if you are still in therapy for it. When games had less than 16 colors, and all you needed were a few pixels on a cathod ray tube. Playing Pong, and Tennis and hockey all on the same machine! Sometimes you'd forget which one you where playing, but that was also part of the fun! Progress entails transitions, and we are now transitioning. It is sometimes painful and ugly, but it's always necessary unless you stay static forever ...
- rawTruthHurts 10y ago
  You can always compare a skateboard to a car if you want to make that kind of point, I guess.
- masswerk 10y ago
  The only problem: We're downgrading functionality, while upscaling file sizes, bandwidths, processor load, the complexity of the tool chains involved, the costs of development, etc. Most of what we do was present for decades, and there's not so much change at all. E.g., there's not so much difference in requesting live data in a browser by the use of a hidden frame and reacting to its onload event (or using a mechanism, which became later known as padded JSON), like in the 1990s, and using a nifty AJAX library. (You're still requesting some data from a server to load it into the browser and eventually process it in an onload event handler in order to partially update the UI). The difference is really in the amount of processing and tooling involved in pulling this up. And then, there's the bitter irony of the history that started with the iPhone. Before, there had been smart phones, too, like the SE's ones, perfectly capable of displaying a subset of HTML4, and even a wide range of feature phones, being perfectly able to display a subset of XHTML. The selling point of the iPhone was its ability of displaying perfectly normal websites without any further modifications or restrictions applied. Now, file sizes are shooting up (because mobile?) and even your 4K screen is restricted most of the time to what may be done on a 5 inch touch display at the cost of high processing loads implied by an abundance of abstraction layers that are never put to a sensible use in the first place. So transition is nice and a good thing (like, if we had made use of multipart-http, as in HTTP1.1, but, yes, there was this MS bug regarding http chunks -- however, we may get now a second chance), but, nevertheless, we may question the direction of a particular transition from time to time.
ieatkittens 10y ago
Ironically, the text is too small to read on my Android HN client. No zooming either.
vilmosi 10y ago
Kind of ironic complaining about UX, given the website...
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  I prefer that sort of UX. It places the principle of least surprise first. But then again, I'm not defending a budget for "doing UX." I just wanna be able to read the thing.
kichik 10y ago
I think the sacrifice is worth it. Frameworks and ever growing abstractions mean more people with less experience can implement more ideas faster. We get faster iterations which means more features that help real people get stuff done. This trend actually helps more people than ever use computers for an ever growing array of purposes. Back in the good old days you had to hire developers from a very small group of qualified individuals and then have them spend months on optimizing new code they just wrote instead of using an existing framework. Today you can just read a tutorial online and create a usable POC yourself. This opens so many doors to both developers and new users. The resource heavy UI practices actually attract more users. Average users don't want dense console UIs or old fashioned native Windows forms. They want a touch app on their mobile that just works. All the tools we have today allow easily sharing and customizing UI components. This in turn fuels fast iteration and improvement of UI so that actual users actually want to use it. All this doesn't mean you have to be lazy and just freely consume as many resources as you can. It also doesn't mean you shouldn't shame applications for being slow (I'm looking at you Slack for desktop...) or resource hungry like the examples in the article. But overall I think we are definitely going in the right direction.
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
The modern software industry can't even come up with a coherent mechanism to evaluate what it produces. It's factionalized according to everyone's path through life.

62 points by adito 10y ago

I'd prefer it if most web sites were textual. Also, disabling JavaScript can have some hilarious effects for some web pages :D

goda90 10y ago
Just do it in HTML(with functioning links), not a text document on gopher like this article.
Nadya 10y ago
I agree. Most blogs should not require Javascript to read - that includes GA. Just a little bit of styling to aid readability and you should be set. Related: motherfuckingwebsite.com & bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com

cr3ative 10y ago

Author complains of UI design degrading, later goes on to mention "(the URL is actually one line, had to split it to fit into 67 char width)". Fantastic.

eis 10y ago
Yea he had some very good points but that one made me chuckle.
goda90 10y ago
It's like he reacted to overly complicated websites by going to another extreme of making a text document on gopher. Simple HTML on www would have made his point beautifully and been functional so that I didn't have to copy paste the URL.
- cellularmitosis 10y ago
  Philip Greenspun's site has always been my golden standard of what you can do with minimal, hand-edited HTML. http://philip.greenspun.com/writing/ http://philip.greenspun.com/writing/
  - leadingthenet 10y ago
    Is it, though? I find it extremely difficult to read paragraphs that are that wide.
    - goda90 10y ago
      You could always shrink your window.

ggasp 10y ago

Hacker News is at its worst.

elnygren 10y ago

This. I spend probably 4GB+ RAM only to send IMs to people. (I run WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack and Chrome/Facebook) The sad fact is that the general public only seems to care about the fancy buttons. And from a business standpoint, cheap software (high level langs/tools that are bad for perf) and following current design trends are more important than CPU cycles. Perhaps we'll see some kind of "back to the basics" movement in the future where UI and software becomes much more simpler.

na85 10y ago
There used to be little animated gifs that we'd put on our Geocities pages with flashing "thank you for not using AOL" or "don't surf and AOL" slogans. IMHO the web needs a movement akin to "nosql", but for bloated crap like JavaScript. My web browsing experience has only improved after installing noscript.
- jasonkostempski 10y ago
  I think the world is starting down this path, this is the second link to a .txt file in my news feed today :) I've recently been longing for a way to easily filter the internet to text/plain only content, not only is there no bloat, the content tends to have actual substance. Edit: Holy smokes, the site hosting the content is what I'm talking about http://weeb.ddns.net/1/gopher http://weeb.ddns.net/1/gopher I'd still like a text/plain only Google though, I'd be willing to POST the search request for such a thing via cURL.
  - sanderjd 10y ago
    This was also the second link I followed to a text file today, both on this domain (same author?). I went through the hassle of pinch-zooming to make the first one sort-of legible on my phone, because the content (C without the stdlib) was worth it, but I immediately hit the back button on this one. I really don't understand the inclination to make things harder to use, for what purpose, nostalgia?
    - 10y ago

blauditore 10y ago

I think the main reason for worse performance is not adding unnecessary features or covering lazyness. It's due to additional complexity introduced by additional layers like VMs, sandboxes and frameworks. These things make development more fun, quicker, cheaper and easier to target more platforms. I think software wouldn't have evolved so fast if every dev was still doing manual memory management in C. Don't get me wrong, close-to-metal coding and native, fast UIs are wonderful where appropriate, but there's no sense in doing it for every small cookie bakery website.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

freehunter 10y ago

So this is just a txt file on a server... why is it completely blank when I open it? I could understand if there was a SQL database and a heavy PHP application serving requests and the system ran out of memory or Apache ran out of open connections... but it's a txt file. I could even see there being an incompatibility between my browser and the site's coding. Maybe they're using fancy new Javascript techniques or their CSS doesn't play well with Safari... but it's a txt file. I guess it's modern software at its worst: we can't even display a plaintext file in the browser reliably.

emptyfile 10y ago
On Vivaldi here, can't see it either :)
iliaznk 10y ago
macOS Sierra, Chrome, empty page.
tjelen 10y ago
I think the page is just down at the moment. Even when using curl it doesn't return anything.
vbezhenar 10y ago
http://pastebin.com/raw/fqqf06AD http://pastebin.com/raw/fqqf06AD
eis 10y ago
From what I understood it's actually a proxy to some gopher server. And it returns an HTML page with css etc and not just a txt file. Funny stuff.

anc84 10y ago

Archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20161129135442/http://weeb.ddns.net/0/articles/modern_software_is_at_its_worst.txt https://web.archive.org/web/20161129135442/http://weeb.ddns.... I guess this might explain why it broke: Hello there! You are currently visiting gopherspace through a proxy.

scandox 10y ago

This debate will never end. Money. It's money. Start talking to the guy who pays the pipers, not the pipers. Although, unfortunately they won't read your blog because it isn't on Facebook.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago
The guy that actually pays the piper doesn't even have an opinion on stuff like this.

kelvin0 10y ago

Ah yes, the good old days: When cars had carburetors (and none of that fancy electronic stuff), maintenance was so much simpler. Cold weather sometimes got in the way of starting up, but once you were running, the joy! Using punch cards and mainframes really forced the programmer to think his solution through and optimize the hell out of it. Once in a while your cards would not get entered properly, but in the end this made you a better programmer even if you are still in therapy for it. When games had less than 16 colors, and all you needed were a few pixels on a cathod ray tube. Playing Pong, and Tennis and hockey all on the same machine! Sometimes you'd forget which one you where playing, but that was also part of the fun! Progress entails transitions, and we are now transitioning. It is sometimes painful and ugly, but it's always necessary unless you stay static forever ...

rawTruthHurts 10y ago
You can always compare a skateboard to a car if you want to make that kind of point, I guess.
masswerk 10y ago
The only problem: We're downgrading functionality, while upscaling file sizes, bandwidths, processor load, the complexity of the tool chains involved, the costs of development, etc. Most of what we do was present for decades, and there's not so much change at all. E.g., there's not so much difference in requesting live data in a browser by the use of a hidden frame and reacting to its onload event (or using a mechanism, which became later known as padded JSON), like in the 1990s, and using a nifty AJAX library. (You're still requesting some data from a server to load it into the browser and eventually process it in an onload event handler in order to partially update the UI). The difference is really in the amount of processing and tooling involved in pulling this up. And then, there's the bitter irony of the history that started with the iPhone. Before, there had been smart phones, too, like the SE's ones, perfectly capable of displaying a subset of HTML4, and even a wide range of feature phones, being perfectly able to display a subset of XHTML. The selling point of the iPhone was its ability of displaying perfectly normal websites without any further modifications or restrictions applied. Now, file sizes are shooting up (because mobile?) and even your 4K screen is restricted most of the time to what may be done on a 5 inch touch display at the cost of high processing loads implied by an abundance of abstraction layers that are never put to a sensible use in the first place. So transition is nice and a good thing (like, if we had made use of multipart-http, as in HTTP1.1, but, yes, there was this MS bug regarding http chunks -- however, we may get now a second chance), but, nevertheless, we may question the direction of a particular transition from time to time.

ieatkittens 10y ago

Ironically, the text is too small to read on my Android HN client. No zooming either.

vilmosi 10y ago

Kind of ironic complaining about UX, given the website...

ArkyBeagle 10y ago
I prefer that sort of UX. It places the principle of least surprise first. But then again, I'm not defending a budget for "doing UX." I just wanna be able to read the thing.

kichik 10y ago

I think the sacrifice is worth it. Frameworks and ever growing abstractions mean more people with less experience can implement more ideas faster. We get faster iterations which means more features that help real people get stuff done. This trend actually helps more people than ever use computers for an ever growing array of purposes. Back in the good old days you had to hire developers from a very small group of qualified individuals and then have them spend months on optimizing new code they just wrote instead of using an existing framework. Today you can just read a tutorial online and create a usable POC yourself. This opens so many doors to both developers and new users. The resource heavy UI practices actually attract more users. Average users don't want dense console UIs or old fashioned native Windows forms. They want a touch app on their mobile that just works. All the tools we have today allow easily sharing and customizing UI components. This in turn fuels fast iteration and improvement of UI so that actual users actually want to use it. All this doesn't mean you have to be lazy and just freely consume as many resources as you can. It also doesn't mean you shouldn't shame applications for being slow (I'm looking at you Slack for desktop...) or resource hungry like the examples in the article. But overall I think we are definitely going in the right direction.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago

The modern software industry can't even come up with a coherent mechanism to evaluate what it produces. It's factionalized according to everyone's path through life.