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I agree with all of your points, I just wonder (hypothetically) if things could be improved, or are we at the peak already? I think certain things, like the web

I agree with all of your points, I just wonder (hypothetically) if things could be improved, or are we at the peak already? I think certain things, like the web browser, could be made much better if we rethought it and simplified it. Of course, we are fighting a huge battle against legacy, but big things have been killed in the past (see Flash)

chubot 10y ago
I agree about the web browser, but unfortunately there's a tradeoff between features and stability. A browser from 2016 has to do way more than a browser from 2006 or 1996. It's supporting much more of the world's interaction now, in a very literal sense. So we have gained a lot, but it comes at a cost. Both Firefox and Chrome have had severe stability issues, and I hope that when this period of rapid web evolution subsides, there will be a rethinking and consolidation. I believe Douglas Crockford said that the period of stasis after IE6 and before Firefox was the one of best things for JavaScript, and I think there is something to that argument. Although I would ask you -- improved along what dimension? Everything is a tradeoff. I agree that software is much too buggy and slow. As far as being "bloated" and complex, I used to be part of the church of simplicity, but I've come to realize that the use cases for computing are just very diverse. Though I would like to get all these features without the associated instability and performance drop (i.e. paying for what you don't use). Bjarne Stroustrop expresses this well; he says he hears this all the time: "C++ should be a much smaller and simpler language. Please add this tiny feature I'm missing". I think there's a lot of truth to that. I'm working on a shell [1] because it's a language that connects other languages. It's the glue that makes some of the complexity manageable. And it's also the language closest to the OS other than C -- you might call it the "second language" that boots up on any system. Shell is of a horrible legacy mess too. It's an instance of failure by success, much like PHP. I think the reason for the mess is that piling new crap on top is easier than fixing and replacing old stuff. It's much easier to write a new language than to replace an old language, and probably more fun. A lot of my blog is basically software archaeology. If people want things to be better, they have to roll up their sleeves and dig into the systems that people ACTUALLY USE and fix them, rather than just proposing "revolutionary stuff" that only adds to the pile. [1]: http://www.oilshell.org/blog/ http://www.oilshell.org/blog/

chubot 10y ago

I agree about the web browser, but unfortunately there's a tradeoff between features and stability. A browser from 2016 has to do way more than a browser from 2006 or 1996. It's supporting much more of the world's interaction now, in a very literal sense. So we have gained a lot, but it comes at a cost. Both Firefox and Chrome have had severe stability issues, and I hope that when this period of rapid web evolution subsides, there will be a rethinking and consolidation. I believe Douglas Crockford said that the period of stasis after IE6 and before Firefox was the one of best things for JavaScript, and I think there is something to that argument. Although I would ask you -- improved along what dimension? Everything is a tradeoff. I agree that software is much too buggy and slow. As far as being "bloated" and complex, I used to be part of the church of simplicity, but I've come to realize that the use cases for computing are just very diverse. Though I would like to get all these features without the associated instability and performance drop (i.e. paying for what you don't use). Bjarne Stroustrop expresses this well; he says he hears this all the time: "C++ should be a much smaller and simpler language. Please add this tiny feature I'm missing". I think there's a lot of truth to that. I'm working on a shell [1] because it's a language that connects other languages. It's the glue that makes some of the complexity manageable. And it's also the language closest to the OS other than C -- you might call it the "second language" that boots up on any system. Shell is of a horrible legacy mess too. It's an instance of failure by success, much like PHP. I think the reason for the mess is that piling new crap on top is easier than fixing and replacing old stuff. It's much easier to write a new language than to replace an old language, and probably more fun. A lot of my blog is basically software archaeology. If people want things to be better, they have to roll up their sleeves and dig into the systems that people ACTUALLY USE and fix them, rather than just proposing "revolutionary stuff" that only adds to the pile. [1]: http://www.oilshell.org/blog/ http://www.oilshell.org/blog/