4 ms·

The obvious answer is technological development, though I think it is a bit more subtle than that. It seems like there is an evolutionary cycle going on: Softw

The obvious answer is technological development, though I think it is a bit more subtle than that. It seems like there is an evolutionary cycle going on: Software becomes too complex, is being abandoned in favour of simpler products to support specific needs. They do in turn also become bloated and complex over time. My latest think on this is something that has been discussed here earlier in various ways. I think to is because of forced growth. However, I think a lot of projects would benefit from a fixed scope and then doing maintenance really well.

bluetomcat 6y ago
It's the competitive market environment which forces companies to release new stuff in order to stay relevant, coupled with the mental conditioning of most people that newer is almost always better. That's why we see platforms and frameworks and clouds carrying a whole ecosystem around them, instead of sharply-focused tools which get a specific job done. A sharply-focused tool tackles a specific problem that exists at a certain time, in a certain domain. Once the tool solves the problem well, there is no reason to change it. Once the original problem is gone, the tool has no reason to exist.
brobdingnagians 6y ago
Reminds me of how music developed over time. Opera was originally a reaction against the polyphonic vocal music before it. Opera started out as simple, one voice music which they believed was modelled on "ancient Greek style"; then it became progressively more complex until Wagner, then electric guitars, then folk/acoustic, etc..
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
norman784 6y ago
Today a lot of projects looks like simple apps but uses a ton of abstraction layers (that help them to deliver in no time a complete app, but at the cost of performance and optimizations, I'm looking to you electron apps), also there's a C developer that a while ago did a rant about Visual Studio that at in a Pentium 4, more or less 13-15 years ago, it took like 1 or 2 seconds to launch while today it takes more than 10 seconds to launch in a decent computer that is way faster than before, yet it do a lot of maybe unnecessary things or has been built over too many abstraction layers that makes the software slower and slower.
kijin 6y ago
Even going into maintenance-only mode will not stop companies from having to find creative ways to collect money from their customers long after the initial purchase. Maintenance costs money. People don't want to pay a lot of money up front. They also don't want to pay for upgrades or subscriptions if they don't feel like they're getting something useful from time to time. Unfortunately, most people who buy consumer-grade proprietary software don't seem to feel that "being stable and well-maintained" is a useful feature on its own even without any new features. (Enterprise software is a different beast, of course. A very large part of RHEL's value proposition is that it doesn't get any new features, only security fixes, for a decade.)

bluetomcat 6y ago

It's the competitive market environment which forces companies to release new stuff in order to stay relevant, coupled with the mental conditioning of most people that newer is almost always better. That's why we see platforms and frameworks and clouds carrying a whole ecosystem around them, instead of sharply-focused tools which get a specific job done. A sharply-focused tool tackles a specific problem that exists at a certain time, in a certain domain. Once the tool solves the problem well, there is no reason to change it. Once the original problem is gone, the tool has no reason to exist.

brobdingnagians 6y ago

Reminds me of how music developed over time. Opera was originally a reaction against the polyphonic vocal music before it. Opera started out as simple, one voice music which they believed was modelled on "ancient Greek style"; then it became progressively more complex until Wagner, then electric guitars, then folk/acoustic, etc..

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

norman784 6y ago

Today a lot of projects looks like simple apps but uses a ton of abstraction layers (that help them to deliver in no time a complete app, but at the cost of performance and optimizations, I'm looking to you electron apps), also there's a C developer that a while ago did a rant about Visual Studio that at in a Pentium 4, more or less 13-15 years ago, it took like 1 or 2 seconds to launch while today it takes more than 10 seconds to launch in a decent computer that is way faster than before, yet it do a lot of maybe unnecessary things or has been built over too many abstraction layers that makes the software slower and slower.

kijin 6y ago

Even going into maintenance-only mode will not stop companies from having to find creative ways to collect money from their customers long after the initial purchase. Maintenance costs money. People don't want to pay a lot of money up front. They also don't want to pay for upgrades or subscriptions if they don't feel like they're getting something useful from time to time. Unfortunately, most people who buy consumer-grade proprietary software don't seem to feel that "being stable and well-maintained" is a useful feature on its own even without any new features. (Enterprise software is a different beast, of course. A very large part of RHEL's value proposition is that it doesn't get any new features, only security fixes, for a decade.)