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Great talk. I agree that sw is on the decline. You can see it in your OS, on the web, everywhere. Robust products are replaced with 'modern' crappy redesigns. W

Great talk. I agree that sw is on the decline. You can see it in your OS, on the web, everywhere. Robust products are replaced with 'modern' crappy redesigns. We are surprised if the thing still works after 5 years. I don't agree on his conclusions. The real source of problem is that now we have maybe x100000 more software than we had in 70s. It's that many more programmers, so not just the 1% smartest greybeards as before. We need more abstractions, and yes, they will run slower and have their issues. Also, not everybody is sitting at the top of hierarchy of abstractions. Some roll up their sleeves and work on JIT runtimes and breakthrough DB algorithms. All those blocks of software need to communicate with the platform and between them. IMO the way out is open source. Open platforms, open standards, open policies. Every time I found a good piece of code in company's huge codebase, it was open source library. Every time. You have to open up to external world to produce well engineered piece of software. The lack of financial models for open source is the obstacle. We should work on making simple and robust software profitable.

imiric 7y ago
> The real source of problem is that now we have maybe x100000 more software than we had in 70s. It's that many more programmers, so not just the 1% smartest greybeards as before. The greybeards from the 70s weren't much smarter than today's programmers. They were the same curious hackers from today, with the advantage of being born in the right place at the right time, when the technology was still developing, so they were forced to build their own tools and operating systems. > We need more abstractions, and yes, they will run slower and have their issues. I disagree, and side with Jon Blow on this: abstractions (if done well) create the illusion of simplicity and more often that not hide the apparent complexity of lower levels. Sometimes this complexity is indeed too difficult to work with, but often it's the problem itself that needs to be simplified instead of creating an abstraction layer on top. I think as an industry we've failed to make meaningful abstractions while educating new programmers on the lower level functionality. A lot of today's programmers learned on Python, PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, etc., which are incredibly complex tools by themselves. And only a minority of those will end up going back and really learning the fundamentals in the same way hackers in the 60s and 70s did. > IMO the way out is open source. Open platforms, open standards, open policies. Agreed. But education and simplification are also crucial.
- jmiskovic 7y ago
  The argument wasn't that people were smarter back in 70s. Instead, computers were rare, only the most motivated individuals could reach them. They were curious hackers as you say, and today's curious hackers are just as good. They form maybe 1% of programmer population. Regarding abstractions, I feel you are talking about leaky abstractions - systems that offer a simplified interface but still manage to burden you with all the implementation details. It's hard to identify such poorly engineered building blocks until it's too late. Thus layers get built on top of them and it becomes too costly to go back and rework the stack. This is a problem with development processes favoring new features over paying the accumulated tech debt. Still, good building blocks can exist. You can (and often must) have complexity if it's properly isolated and does not leak. I'd say JVM is great example of abstraction that is slower and internally more complex than SW done native, but brings much to the table as a platform to build on. Other examples: BeamVM, ZeroMQ, Lua (leaky, but at least very simple). Browsers unfortunately are too burdened with legacy and security issues. I feel my formal education has failed to teach me how to design proper interfaces between systems. Instead we are taught pointer arithmetic and mainstream OOP ("cat IS an animal").
josephg 7y ago
I'm consistently confused how we manage to run so many more lines of code, yet our software doesn't really do anything it didn't do in the late 90s. Back then I chatted over IRC, browsed the web and played video games. Now I chat over whatsapp, browse the web and play indie video games. In 2009 Chrome had 1.3M SLOC. Today it has 25M. And that number has been going up linearly - since 2016, not including comments, chrome has added 2.1M SLOC per year. Thats another entire 2009 google chrome web browser in code added to chrome every 8 months. Can you name a single feature added to chrome in the last 8 months? I can't. As Blow says, productivity (measured in features per LOC) has been trending toward 0 for a long time. What a tragic waste of google's fantastic engineering talent. I pick on Chrome because the data is available. And because I regretfully have about 8 copies that code on my computer. But I bet we'd see the same curve with lots of modern software. The LOC numbers for microsoft windows have become so large that I can't really comprehend how so many programatic structures can do so little. I once heard this architecture pattern referred to as a pile of rocks. Piles of rocks are really simple and elegant - you can always add features to your pile of rocks. Just add rocks on the top until its tall enough! Piles of rocks are really easy to debug too. Just shake the pile (unit tests), and when anything collapses, add rocks until the hole is filled in (= patch that specific issue). Then rinse and repeat. You don't need to bother with modelling or proofs or any of that stuff when working on a pile of rocks. Look at those Haskell programmers over there building aqueducts using archways. Peh. they should get jobs writing real programs. Ahem. [1] https://www.openhub.net/p/chrome/analyses/latest/languages_summary https://www.openhub.net/p/chrome/analyses/latest/languages_s...
eafkuor 7y ago
How is it a great talk? He makes a lot of statements without backing them up at all
- jmiskovic 7y ago
  He voices his opinion clearly and holds audience attention well. He provides quite a few interesting examples of lost knowledge and civilization decline. He goes against common assumption that tech is ever-evolving and shows how and why the software infrastructure is failing under our feet. The day after I watched the talk I was compelled to watch the mentioned Apollo 11 documentary. For me this was a great talk, but feel free to disagree.
  - eafkuor 7y ago
    I don't disagree with you, actually. I was fixating on his unproven statements and I couldn't see past that. Can't really argue with you. Was the documentary "When We Left Earth"?
    - jmiskovic 7y ago
      It's called "Apollo 11" released by Neon studio this year. It's historical footage of the whole trip, without any commentaries or interviews. Well put together, immersive and epic. Doesn't go into much science or engineering beyond showing the massive scale of rocket and launching platform.

imiric 7y ago

> The real source of problem is that now we have maybe x100000 more software than we had in 70s. It's that many more programmers, so not just the 1% smartest greybeards as before. The greybeards from the 70s weren't much smarter than today's programmers. They were the same curious hackers from today, with the advantage of being born in the right place at the right time, when the technology was still developing, so they were forced to build their own tools and operating systems. > We need more abstractions, and yes, they will run slower and have their issues. I disagree, and side with Jon Blow on this: abstractions (if done well) create the illusion of simplicity and more often that not hide the apparent complexity of lower levels. Sometimes this complexity is indeed too difficult to work with, but often it's the problem itself that needs to be simplified instead of creating an abstraction layer on top. I think as an industry we've failed to make meaningful abstractions while educating new programmers on the lower level functionality. A lot of today's programmers learned on Python, PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, etc., which are incredibly complex tools by themselves. And only a minority of those will end up going back and really learning the fundamentals in the same way hackers in the 60s and 70s did. > IMO the way out is open source. Open platforms, open standards, open policies. Agreed. But education and simplification are also crucial.

jmiskovic 7y ago
The argument wasn't that people were smarter back in 70s. Instead, computers were rare, only the most motivated individuals could reach them. They were curious hackers as you say, and today's curious hackers are just as good. They form maybe 1% of programmer population. Regarding abstractions, I feel you are talking about leaky abstractions - systems that offer a simplified interface but still manage to burden you with all the implementation details. It's hard to identify such poorly engineered building blocks until it's too late. Thus layers get built on top of them and it becomes too costly to go back and rework the stack. This is a problem with development processes favoring new features over paying the accumulated tech debt. Still, good building blocks can exist. You can (and often must) have complexity if it's properly isolated and does not leak. I'd say JVM is great example of abstraction that is slower and internally more complex than SW done native, but brings much to the table as a platform to build on. Other examples: BeamVM, ZeroMQ, Lua (leaky, but at least very simple). Browsers unfortunately are too burdened with legacy and security issues. I feel my formal education has failed to teach me how to design proper interfaces between systems. Instead we are taught pointer arithmetic and mainstream OOP ("cat IS an animal").

josephg 7y ago

I'm consistently confused how we manage to run so many more lines of code, yet our software doesn't really do anything it didn't do in the late 90s. Back then I chatted over IRC, browsed the web and played video games. Now I chat over whatsapp, browse the web and play indie video games. In 2009 Chrome had 1.3M SLOC. Today it has 25M. And that number has been going up linearly - since 2016, not including comments, chrome has added 2.1M SLOC per year. Thats another entire 2009 google chrome web browser in code added to chrome every 8 months. Can you name a single feature added to chrome in the last 8 months? I can't. As Blow says, productivity (measured in features per LOC) has been trending toward 0 for a long time. What a tragic waste of google's fantastic engineering talent. I pick on Chrome because the data is available. And because I regretfully have about 8 copies that code on my computer. But I bet we'd see the same curve with lots of modern software. The LOC numbers for microsoft windows have become so large that I can't really comprehend how so many programatic structures can do so little. I once heard this architecture pattern referred to as a pile of rocks. Piles of rocks are really simple and elegant - you can always add features to your pile of rocks. Just add rocks on the top until its tall enough! Piles of rocks are really easy to debug too. Just shake the pile (unit tests), and when anything collapses, add rocks until the hole is filled in (= patch that specific issue). Then rinse and repeat. You don't need to bother with modelling or proofs or any of that stuff when working on a pile of rocks. Look at those Haskell programmers over there building aqueducts using archways. Peh. they should get jobs writing real programs. Ahem. [1] https://www.openhub.net/p/chrome/analyses/latest/languages_summary https://www.openhub.net/p/chrome/analyses/latest/languages_s...

eafkuor 7y ago

How is it a great talk? He makes a lot of statements without backing them up at all

jmiskovic 7y ago
He voices his opinion clearly and holds audience attention well. He provides quite a few interesting examples of lost knowledge and civilization decline. He goes against common assumption that tech is ever-evolving and shows how and why the software infrastructure is failing under our feet. The day after I watched the talk I was compelled to watch the mentioned Apollo 11 documentary. For me this was a great talk, but feel free to disagree.
- eafkuor 7y ago
  I don't disagree with you, actually. I was fixating on his unproven statements and I couldn't see past that. Can't really argue with you. Was the documentary "When We Left Earth"?
  - jmiskovic 7y ago
    It's called "Apollo 11" released by Neon studio this year. It's historical footage of the whole trip, without any commentaries or interviews. Well put together, immersive and epic. Doesn't go into much science or engineering beyond showing the massive scale of rocket and launching platform.