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> The only thing that matters in software is the experience of the user. While ultimately true, it's a bit too simplistic, because it presents user-experience

> The only thing that matters in software is the experience of the user. While ultimately true, it's a bit too simplistic, because it presents user-experience as a constant. Done deal. Delivered or not. In reality the user experience is something which will change over time, as the software is updated and evolves to accommodate the additional needs of the users. If you can't keep your code clean over time, your code will start suck, needless complexity might sneak in, and so will the user-experience start to suffer as well. A good user-experience, just like the code, needs to be maintained. And thus comes the need to organize the code. And for a developer to bother maintaining the code, and for him to be efficient at it, he should work with tools and within an environment which fits his needs (and accommodates his requirements for a good user-experience). And thus comes fiddling with editor-settings. Etc etc. Basically this rant highlights a real problem: Software complexity is out of control. But the conclusion does not support the arguments given. Rather his conclusion drives all the things he rants about being wrong in the first place. I think, in the end, to get clean code, to get rid of needless complexity, there's one simple thing which trumps everything else: You need someone empowered to make the required changes. And you need that person to care. Without that, it's all just us waiting it out, until it starts heading into the abyss. We can already see that with lots of the bigger open-source projects which once fuelled the (small) Linux desktop revolution a decade ago. So how do we cope? > There will come a point where the accumulated complexity of our existing systems is greater than the complexity of creating a new one. When that happens all of this shit will be trashed. We can flush boost and glib and autoconf down the toilet and never think of them again. Maybe we will. But I don't believe for one second that we're going to break the cycle this time around, because finding and keeping someone caring enough for decades to come is a pretty tall order.

digi_owl 10y ago
And this is perhaps why the unix philosophy has such pull, as it suggests an environment where one can make changes and adaptions piecemeal and at ones own pace. But that suggests abandoning the notion of the DE, and going back to WMs and agreeing on, never mind adhering to, the ways software exchange data. Something that is the polar opposite of the direction that "desktop Linux" is moving these days.

digi_owl 10y ago

And this is perhaps why the unix philosophy has such pull, as it suggests an environment where one can make changes and adaptions piecemeal and at ones own pace. But that suggests abandoning the notion of the DE, and going back to WMs and agreeing on, never mind adhering to, the ways software exchange data. Something that is the polar opposite of the direction that "desktop Linux" is moving these days.