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> If you spend all your time on them, people perceive your product as holding still. This is precisely what bothers me about the vast majority of software out

> If you spend all your time on them, people perceive your product as holding still. This is precisely what bothers me about the vast majority of software out there. It's hard to find software that doesn't suffer from what I call, for lack of a better name, "forced evolution": the devs keep fiddling with the UI and adding new features of dubious usefulness. Meanwhile, the quality slowly, but surely deteriorates: the software gets bloated, runs slower, becomes harder to use, etc.

ff317 7y ago
+1000 This was how I said it, buried off in the documentation of an open source project: I'm not a fan of the way most software is developed, where features accrete on features in endless succession like barnacles attaching to the hull of a ship until there's more barnacles than ship. I think most developers don't spend enough time on quality, on refactoring, or on cleanliness, and I think they don't weigh the costs of every new feature (and every piece of old compatibility cruft) as heavily as they should. I'm also not a fan of the kind of personal rigidity where one never questions one's own past decisions and thoughts. I regularly make stupid design mistakes, and I don't want to have to live with them forever. Software projects should at least try to value simplicity and purposeful design, and try to avoid the Second System Effect.