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I think what guy is actually experiencing strong feeling of nostalgia for older times. And I understand that. I see it on myself more and more with coming years

I think what guy is actually experiencing strong feeling of nostalgia for older times. And I understand that. I see it on myself more and more with coming years too. We were simply born in some era, which holds strong memories in us. We hold sentiment to old things (programs), because somehow they're connected with best memories from time we were much younger. And the best memories are usually bounded to age around 20 - 30. Ask senior to tell you a story from his time and there is high probability that the story will be from their younger times, than from older ones. My point is, that maybe todays software is not all that bad. We just don't feel the same needs as 20 year old guy somewhere at Google who programmed it. And it also works apposite way too. Show 20 year guy Visicalc, what he will think about it. Or check teens reactions to Windows 95. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ucCxtgN6sc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ucCxtgN6sc

tomc1985 9y ago
But maybe it is. On nearly every metric that matters to power users software is worse. Control? We have less. Options? Less. Ownership? Not that we ever had it, but now you don't even get a disc. Licenses are even more restrictive. The pace of 'upgrades'? Way, unnecessarily faster And when the business dies now? Now you're fucked. There are stories of mechanics running their shops today with 40-year-old dinosaurs, where their biggest logistical issue is getting old parts to repair when it breaks. It was sad that the magazine article I read that story in laughed at the "backwards" proprietor, when in fact he is a hero for standing up to the current trend of users-as-serfs cloud everything.
- ravitation 9y ago
  > On nearly every metric that matters to power users software is worse. Citation needed.
  - tomc1985 9y ago
    Citation: myself and the other power users I have talked with. WTF is this, wikipedia?? Robot.
    - s73ver_ 9y ago
      I'm going to challenge those citations, then.
    - mitchdoogle 9y ago
      You worded your initial response like you were referencing actual stats about software. I'm sure you think you and your colleagues are reliable sources, but to the rest of the world, they aren't.
      - tomc1985 9y ago
        Every single one of those statements was subjective. Don't be fooled by my use of the word 'metric'. It is, frankly, amazing that people here expect one to have facts and citations for every little nitty point.
        ravitation 9y ago
        It's not about having a "fact or citation for every nitty point"... It's about having even a tiny grain of self-awareness before making a statement about the global state of software in 2017, and perhaps having the self-awareness to know that, generally speaking, your anecdote ("citation") is meaningless. I guess at some point I need to stop being surprised that HN comments are really no better than Reddit's.
- white-flame 9y ago
  > The pace of 'upgrades'? Way, unnecessarily faster Not only that, but the availability of easy upgrades has incentivized companies to sell unfinished software and hope to patch fast enough in response to user complaints, instead of even bothering to actually finish the product as marketed.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  "Options? Less." How so, given that more people are able to write software, and it's easier to create something than ever before? "And when the business dies now? Now you're fucked." How is that any different than before?
  - tomc1985 9y ago
    You've answered your own question... more people are learning to program, from fewer and more professionally run sources, which preach a gospel that prizes engagement, conversions and ease-of-use, over empowerment, functionality, or choice. Plus, with this larger and more mainstream community, where 'coders' are pulled in off the street with little technical knowledge (let alone passion) who never grokked complex apps anyway, produce what they know. The end result is a sea of gimped, appliance-like 'apps' that do little more than funnel users towards business objectives. And when the business died, their software still ran. Hard-won expertise kept it running. No stupid CEO or developer could stop you, and neither could they pull the rug out from under your feet with a sunset or some other shitty move. You bought your software and that, mercifully, could be the end of your relationship with that publisher.
    - s73ver_ 9y ago
      This doesn't really address my point. You still haven't explained anything regarding choice, or any of your other points.
almonj 9y ago
Computers are about control and wanting to return to the old days of aiding the power user has nothing to do with nostalgia.
vikramkrishnan 9y ago
Well the only way a 20 year old is getting weirded out by a Win 95 interface is (1) he has never seen a Windows machine because Win 10 basically reverted to the same Win 95 interface or (2) never worked on a desktop/laptop with KDE, Cinnamon or the other DEs inspired by Win 95. And Win 95's UI rocks IMHO (and I say that as a person closer in age to those annoying pipsqueaks in that video). You go to a button labeled "START". It has clearly labeled folders called "Accessories", "Programs", "Internet" etc and then you get to where you want to. For 90% of the UIs, a tree like that is a perfectly good data structure. The more annoying thing is why is it that software like Office etc take two orders of nagnitude more RAM while being essentially 90% similar in functionality to Office '97
- peatmoss 9y ago
  > You go to a button labeled "START". It has clearly labeled folders called "Accessories", "Programs", "Internet" etc and then you get to where you want to. For 90% of the UIs, a tree like that is a perfectly good data structure. The strict hierarchy of the start menu was admittedly pretty nice, right up until (I think) Windows XP, where they started having the weird bifurcation at the parent level.
vanderZwan 9y ago
> My point is, that maybe todays software is not all that bad. Well, as an interface designer who is supposedly in the age category where his best memories are still being created I feel a bit insulted, because from my point of view, a lot of things are pretty bad. Don't get me wrong, things are also a lot better, but there is more to life than HD video, better color fidelity, novelties made possible by virtual reality, and the interconnectedness of the web - even when these are all big improvements over the past! But it does feel like the computer is being domesticated into the new TV. As far as interfaces themselves go, the main culprit (from a design POV) is almost always the priority of touch-first design, with mouse a distant second, and keyboard input only existing for things that could not removed through dumbing things down, like input forms. Now touch interfaces are great in some areas, but any time I have to select/copy/paste text I am painfully reminded of their limits. In general it feels like 90% of the time I am struggling to do things that would be trivial with mouse and/or keyboard. And let's not even go into the lack of tactile feedback[0]. Even more insulting is that it is not that hard to make an interface that supports different modes of input, or where the potential keyboard input is easy to understand. There even exist modern quasi-innovations like react-select, which uses a select field for mouse and touch and lets you type to autocomplete among available options for keyboard power-users[1]. The opening line about perceptual slowness also rings true. In my childhood we had long loading times because of slow hard drives or CD-drives. Now we have them for the sake of saving development costs and adding ad revenue. The internet is a bloated mess, which from a content perspective it doesn't need to be at all; many websites work better if you turn off JavaScript[2]. Then there is web development itself, starting with a reliance on bloated overly generic modules, all the way down to the metal where there is an unawareness that there is even such a thing as an ever increasing memory/processor performance gap, or that this might also affects JavaScript code. Well, it does, and not even browser vendors themselves seem to be fully aware of it. For example: on all platforms that I've tried, a simple radix sort is between two to eighty times faster the built-in sorting algorithms when sorting numbers, for all array types, regardless of whether it is in-place or a sorted copy[3]. (in the use-case for which I investigated it, the improvement is five to ten-fold, allowing me to do interactive animations where before I had to resort to slow renders). The difference makes sense for plain Arrays, which cannot assume integer values, but why the heck are the typed arrays so slow? They're plain contiguous memory array; compared to all the other browser complexities this is about as simple as it gets! I could go on for a while but the point is: it's not like things were better in the past. It's just that a number of these things should have gotten better and instead seem to have regressed. And I know it's complex combination of many reasons, but it's still saddening to see. [0] http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/ http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi... [1] http://jedwatson.github.io/react-select/ http://jedwatson.github.io/react-select/ [2] http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm [3] https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-loop-vs-fill-1509893835173 https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-loop-vs-fil..., https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-100-elements-1510002699404 https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-100-element... https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-loop-vs-fill-in-place-1510007933053 https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-loop-vs-fil..., https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-100-elements-1510002699404 https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-100-element..., https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-loop-vs-fill-1509893835173 https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-loop-vs-fil..., https://run.perf.zone/view/uint32slice0sort-vs-1000-items-typed-and-plain-array-1510082974278 https://run.perf.zone/view/uint32slice0sort-vs-1000-items-ty..., https://run.perf.zone/view/uint32slice0sort-vs-radix-sort-1000000-items-typed-and-plain-array-1510083013093 https://run.perf.zone/view/uint32slice0sort-vs-radix-sort-10...
SilasX 9y ago
Yes I get the rosy-nostalgia bias but ... these apps run demonstrably faster. That's not nostalgia.

tomc1985 9y ago

But maybe it is. On nearly every metric that matters to power users software is worse. Control? We have less. Options? Less. Ownership? Not that we ever had it, but now you don't even get a disc. Licenses are even more restrictive. The pace of 'upgrades'? Way, unnecessarily faster And when the business dies now? Now you're fucked. There are stories of mechanics running their shops today with 40-year-old dinosaurs, where their biggest logistical issue is getting old parts to repair when it breaks. It was sad that the magazine article I read that story in laughed at the "backwards" proprietor, when in fact he is a hero for standing up to the current trend of users-as-serfs cloud everything.

ravitation 9y ago
> On nearly every metric that matters to power users software is worse. Citation needed.
- tomc1985 9y ago
  Citation: myself and the other power users I have talked with. WTF is this, wikipedia?? Robot.
  - s73ver_ 9y ago
    I'm going to challenge those citations, then.
  - mitchdoogle 9y ago
    You worded your initial response like you were referencing actual stats about software. I'm sure you think you and your colleagues are reliable sources, but to the rest of the world, they aren't.
    - tomc1985 9y ago
      Every single one of those statements was subjective. Don't be fooled by my use of the word 'metric'. It is, frankly, amazing that people here expect one to have facts and citations for every little nitty point.
      - ravitation 9y ago
        It's not about having a "fact or citation for every nitty point"... It's about having even a tiny grain of self-awareness before making a statement about the global state of software in 2017, and perhaps having the self-awareness to know that, generally speaking, your anecdote ("citation") is meaningless. I guess at some point I need to stop being surprised that HN comments are really no better than Reddit's.
white-flame 9y ago
> The pace of 'upgrades'? Way, unnecessarily faster Not only that, but the availability of easy upgrades has incentivized companies to sell unfinished software and hope to patch fast enough in response to user complaints, instead of even bothering to actually finish the product as marketed.
s73ver_ 9y ago
"Options? Less." How so, given that more people are able to write software, and it's easier to create something than ever before? "And when the business dies now? Now you're fucked." How is that any different than before?
- tomc1985 9y ago
  You've answered your own question... more people are learning to program, from fewer and more professionally run sources, which preach a gospel that prizes engagement, conversions and ease-of-use, over empowerment, functionality, or choice. Plus, with this larger and more mainstream community, where 'coders' are pulled in off the street with little technical knowledge (let alone passion) who never grokked complex apps anyway, produce what they know. The end result is a sea of gimped, appliance-like 'apps' that do little more than funnel users towards business objectives. And when the business died, their software still ran. Hard-won expertise kept it running. No stupid CEO or developer could stop you, and neither could they pull the rug out from under your feet with a sunset or some other shitty move. You bought your software and that, mercifully, could be the end of your relationship with that publisher.
  - s73ver_ 9y ago
    This doesn't really address my point. You still haven't explained anything regarding choice, or any of your other points.

almonj 9y ago

Computers are about control and wanting to return to the old days of aiding the power user has nothing to do with nostalgia.

vikramkrishnan 9y ago

Well the only way a 20 year old is getting weirded out by a Win 95 interface is (1) he has never seen a Windows machine because Win 10 basically reverted to the same Win 95 interface or (2) never worked on a desktop/laptop with KDE, Cinnamon or the other DEs inspired by Win 95. And Win 95's UI rocks IMHO (and I say that as a person closer in age to those annoying pipsqueaks in that video). You go to a button labeled "START". It has clearly labeled folders called "Accessories", "Programs", "Internet" etc and then you get to where you want to. For 90% of the UIs, a tree like that is a perfectly good data structure. The more annoying thing is why is it that software like Office etc take two orders of nagnitude more RAM while being essentially 90% similar in functionality to Office '97

peatmoss 9y ago
> You go to a button labeled "START". It has clearly labeled folders called "Accessories", "Programs", "Internet" etc and then you get to where you want to. For 90% of the UIs, a tree like that is a perfectly good data structure. The strict hierarchy of the start menu was admittedly pretty nice, right up until (I think) Windows XP, where they started having the weird bifurcation at the parent level.

vanderZwan 9y ago

> My point is, that maybe todays software is not all that bad. Well, as an interface designer who is supposedly in the age category where his best memories are still being created I feel a bit insulted, because from my point of view, a lot of things are pretty bad. Don't get me wrong, things are also a lot better, but there is more to life than HD video, better color fidelity, novelties made possible by virtual reality, and the interconnectedness of the web - even when these are all big improvements over the past! But it does feel like the computer is being domesticated into the new TV. As far as interfaces themselves go, the main culprit (from a design POV) is almost always the priority of touch-first design, with mouse a distant second, and keyboard input only existing for things that could not removed through dumbing things down, like input forms. Now touch interfaces are great in some areas, but any time I have to select/copy/paste text I am painfully reminded of their limits. In general it feels like 90% of the time I am struggling to do things that would be trivial with mouse and/or keyboard. And let's not even go into the lack of tactile feedback[0]. Even more insulting is that it is not that hard to make an interface that supports different modes of input, or where the potential keyboard input is easy to understand. There even exist modern quasi-innovations like react-select, which uses a select field for mouse and touch and lets you type to autocomplete among available options for keyboard power-users[1]. The opening line about perceptual slowness also rings true. In my childhood we had long loading times because of slow hard drives or CD-drives. Now we have them for the sake of saving development costs and adding ad revenue. The internet is a bloated mess, which from a content perspective it doesn't need to be at all; many websites work better if you turn off JavaScript[2]. Then there is web development itself, starting with a reliance on bloated overly generic modules, all the way down to the metal where there is an unawareness that there is even such a thing as an ever increasing memory/processor performance gap, or that this might also affects JavaScript code. Well, it does, and not even browser vendors themselves seem to be fully aware of it. For example: on all platforms that I've tried, a simple radix sort is between two to eighty times faster the built-in sorting algorithms when sorting numbers, for all array types, regardless of whether it is in-place or a sorted copy[3]. (in the use-case for which I investigated it, the improvement is five to ten-fold, allowing me to do interactive animations where before I had to resort to slow renders). The difference makes sense for plain Arrays, which cannot assume integer values, but why the heck are the typed arrays so slow? They're plain contiguous memory array; compared to all the other browser complexities this is about as simple as it gets! I could go on for a while but the point is: it's not like things were better in the past. It's just that a number of these things should have gotten better and instead seem to have regressed. And I know it's complex combination of many reasons, but it's still saddening to see. [0] http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/ http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi... [1] http://jedwatson.github.io/react-select/ http://jedwatson.github.io/react-select/ [2] http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm [3] https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-loop-vs-fill-1509893835173 https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-loop-vs-fil..., https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-100-elements-1510002699404 https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-100-element... https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-loop-vs-fill-in-place-1510007933053 https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-loop-vs-fil..., https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-100-elements-1510002699404 https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-100-element..., https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-loop-vs-fill-1509893835173 https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-loop-vs-fil..., https://run.perf.zone/view/uint32slice0sort-vs-1000-items-typed-and-plain-array-1510082974278 https://run.perf.zone/view/uint32slice0sort-vs-1000-items-ty..., https://run.perf.zone/view/uint32slice0sort-vs-radix-sort-1000000-items-typed-and-plain-array-1510083013093 https://run.perf.zone/view/uint32slice0sort-vs-radix-sort-10...

SilasX 9y ago

Yes I get the rosy-nostalgia bias but ... these apps run demonstrably faster. That's not nostalgia.