4 ms·

One related thing that struck me about SteamCAD was this passage from (the last page of) the manual: "5.1 What Next? Some people may be interested in what are

by avhon1 7y ago

One related thing that struck me about SteamCAD was this passage from (the last page of) the manual: "5.1 What Next? Some people may be interested in what are the future plans with SteamCAD. The answer is there are none. SteamCAD is finished software (the only one in the whole computer world?), there are no plans to extend it. It does everything it was supposed to do, if there are bugs in the software, they are now features of the software. Well, not quite so. Of course, if the software need some adjustment in the future to work on new operating systems, it will be updated. [...] Despite what was written in the section 5.1, we have published a bunch of patches in November 2018. The patch includes several bug fixes, improved precision when snapping to objects and improved handling of paralel curve copies when the distance grows beyond the smallest curve radius." This seems like a rare example of software that is not abandoned, but is "finished", and will suffer no feature creep. It is a romantic idea, for a piece of software to be conceived for an exact purpose, be programmed until it exactly fulfills that purpose, and then just be... done, a crystal molded to its niche.

nogabebop23 7y ago
I love the ideal, but unfortunately this is only a characteristic of software that is not (widely) used. In a combination of the Peter Principle and the Big Bang, software will be used in an every-expanding array of uses for which it will attempt to add first-party support until it collapses under it's own mass and dies a death of ten thousand vertical slice competitors and the process repeats.
- userbinator 7y ago
  Knuth's TeX is somewhat widely used, yet has the similar characteristic of approaching stability.
  - thaeli 7y ago
    Only because LaTeX is separate and most of the development and new features happen there.
tobr 7y ago
While it’s not very common for “utility” software, it’s still the MO for most games. They might get bug fixes or be ported to new platforms, but usually what goes out on release day is intended as “finished”.

by avhon1 7y ago

nogabebop23 7y ago

I love the ideal, but unfortunately this is only a characteristic of software that is not (widely) used. In a combination of the Peter Principle and the Big Bang, software will be used in an every-expanding array of uses for which it will attempt to add first-party support until it collapses under it's own mass and dies a death of ten thousand vertical slice competitors and the process repeats.

userbinator 7y ago
Knuth's TeX is somewhat widely used, yet has the similar characteristic of approaching stability.
- thaeli 7y ago
  Only because LaTeX is separate and most of the development and new features happen there.

tobr 7y ago

While it’s not very common for “utility” software, it’s still the MO for most games. They might get bug fixes or be ported to new platforms, but usually what goes out on release day is intended as “finished”.