3 ms·

I agree, feels like we've conditioned to accept software playing dumb and being unreliable. A couple decades ago, random glitches attracted much scrutiny, toda

I agree, feels like we've conditioned to accept software playing dumb and being unreliable. A couple decades ago, random glitches attracted much scrutiny, today we just take it for granted.

joshuamorton 6y ago
Is that really true? I remember routine blue screens and system hard-crashes a couple decades ago. They're not commonplace today. We're primed to remember the past rosily.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  It's true that there are rose-tinted spectacles at work here, but I don't think modern software is as great as all that. Today's version of a blue screen might be something in us-east-1 being down again and taking half the software on the Internet offline with it, but the effect is much the same, and now you can't necessarily do anything about the outage, you just have to wait until whoever is responsible for the failed infrastructure to decide your problem is important enough to fix next. It's not just cloud, either. I recently had a combination of two popular pieces of software, both widely used by professional programmers, where a plugin was crashing the host application when even basic functionality was triggered. The problem was sufficient that I had to abandon using them and ended up writing that program in a different programming language because it was faster than messing around with broken tools. It turns out that some of these much-touted modern standards for interoperability and portability aren't all that great after all. And of course, while we don't get a literal blue screen any more, it's not as if Windows 10 and several other popular operating systems don't frequently break users' devices, sometimes catastrophically, when rolling out updates. We've just come to expect (by which I really mean, been forced to accept) this culture of shoving broken stuff out and fixing it later, even in the most essential software like our operating systems. Meanwhile, the last time I saw significant instability on any desktop OS prior to quite recently, I think I was running Windows 95. So maybe the spectacles aren't that rose-tinted after all.
- kaba0 6y ago
  But that is because OSs are not rewritten from scratch every time, but rather iterated upon. Just try to use facebook, messenger or countless other “apps”. They have so low quality that I don’t understand how can they even allow publishing those.. There are regular UI glitches, I frankly can’t believe the UI that the requested functionality went through and have to double check, and I even have to check if it didn’t issue commands I didn’t want to.
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  I remember that as long as I didn't install random crap and did basic maintenance, my Win 9x systems worked like clockwork, with only a reboot every couple of days. Windows 2000 was the most solid and stable Windows OS I've used, no issues at all with it, even the pre-releases.
kakwa_ 6y ago
I kind of have the exact opposite in term of feelings. Seeing Windows 95 or 98 going into a BSoD was far more common than today with Windows 10. I also remember seeing Netscape crashing extremely frequently toward the end of the first browser war. By comparison, today, a modern browser is doing a lot more things, but very rarely crashes in my experience. Overall, in term of software quality, I think things have improved, specially thanks to: * the maturing of tools like compilers, dependency managers, linters, unit tests frameworks, etc. * the widespread adoption of development technics ensuring better quality (CI, unit tests, code coverage, automated integration tests, etc). * the development of common building blocks such as libraries and frameworks, which enabled projects to not "re-invent the wheel" every time for low level stuff. These building blocks also being generally widely used, battle tested and more reliable than in house implementations. * the development of OSS which drastically increase the accessibility of the previously mentioned building blocks to developers. Both technically and methodologically, software development has seen tons of improvements since the late 90ies, early 2000.

I agree, feels like we've conditioned to accept software playing dumb and being unreliable. A couple decades ago, random glitches attracted much scrutiny, today we just take it for granted.

joshuamorton 6y ago

Is that really true? I remember routine blue screens and system hard-crashes a couple decades ago. They're not commonplace today. We're primed to remember the past rosily.

Silhouette 6y ago
It's true that there are rose-tinted spectacles at work here, but I don't think modern software is as great as all that. Today's version of a blue screen might be something in us-east-1 being down again and taking half the software on the Internet offline with it, but the effect is much the same, and now you can't necessarily do anything about the outage, you just have to wait until whoever is responsible for the failed infrastructure to decide your problem is important enough to fix next. It's not just cloud, either. I recently had a combination of two popular pieces of software, both widely used by professional programmers, where a plugin was crashing the host application when even basic functionality was triggered. The problem was sufficient that I had to abandon using them and ended up writing that program in a different programming language because it was faster than messing around with broken tools. It turns out that some of these much-touted modern standards for interoperability and portability aren't all that great after all. And of course, while we don't get a literal blue screen any more, it's not as if Windows 10 and several other popular operating systems don't frequently break users' devices, sometimes catastrophically, when rolling out updates. We've just come to expect (by which I really mean, been forced to accept) this culture of shoving broken stuff out and fixing it later, even in the most essential software like our operating systems. Meanwhile, the last time I saw significant instability on any desktop OS prior to quite recently, I think I was running Windows 95. So maybe the spectacles aren't that rose-tinted after all.
kaba0 6y ago
But that is because OSs are not rewritten from scratch every time, but rather iterated upon. Just try to use facebook, messenger or countless other “apps”. They have so low quality that I don’t understand how can they even allow publishing those.. There are regular UI glitches, I frankly can’t believe the UI that the requested functionality went through and have to double check, and I even have to check if it didn’t issue commands I didn’t want to.
forgotmypw17 6y ago
I remember that as long as I didn't install random crap and did basic maintenance, my Win 9x systems worked like clockwork, with only a reboot every couple of days. Windows 2000 was the most solid and stable Windows OS I've used, no issues at all with it, even the pre-releases.

kakwa_ 6y ago

I kind of have the exact opposite in term of feelings. Seeing Windows 95 or 98 going into a BSoD was far more common than today with Windows 10. I also remember seeing Netscape crashing extremely frequently toward the end of the first browser war. By comparison, today, a modern browser is doing a lot more things, but very rarely crashes in my experience. Overall, in term of software quality, I think things have improved, specially thanks to: * the maturing of tools like compilers, dependency managers, linters, unit tests frameworks, etc. * the widespread adoption of development technics ensuring better quality (CI, unit tests, code coverage, automated integration tests, etc). * the development of common building blocks such as libraries and frameworks, which enabled projects to not "re-invent the wheel" every time for low level stuff. These building blocks also being generally widely used, battle tested and more reliable than in house implementations. * the development of OSS which drastically increase the accessibility of the previously mentioned building blocks to developers. Both technically and methodologically, software development has seen tons of improvements since the late 90ies, early 2000.