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Software has a significant advantage over things that have to be made in the real world: it doesn't degrade over time. Digital encoding is fundamentally a way t

by pdkl95 5y ago

Software has a significant advantage over things that have to be made in the real world: it doesn't degrade over time. Digital encoding is fundamentally a way to avoid entropy's inexorable erosive effects. Hardware will eventually fail, but software is deterministic. This means that software can reach a state where known bugs have been fixed and the desired features have been implemented. Such software is de facto "finished". It doesn't need regular development and maintenance; it will continue working indefinitely for the same reason 2 + 2 will still be 4 in the future. Bryan Cantrill once explained[1] >> software does not wear out. That isn’t to say that software never breaks (or isn’t broken to begin with), but software that works can work in perpetuity. A favorite example of mine is troff. The source for troff is some of the nastiest stuff ever written — but it works. It hasn’t been touched in years, and probably will never be: it’s written in a portable language (C) and relies only on the most basic OS facilities. troff will work indefinitely — it will never wear out. >> (The tragic footnote to troff is that its author, Joseph Ossanna, died tragically in 1977; the very fact that his software is humming along perfectly more than a quarter of a decade after his death is a testament to software’s unique imperviousness to wear.) Software doesn't become a liability that should be removed simply by being old. Throwing away software that works is also throwing away decades of bugfixes and experience. Adobe's library of code for handing Type 1 fonts should have reached this "finished" state a long time ago. The maintenance cost of the Type 1 font feature should have been very close to zero. Removing support would have been more expensive: it required paying devs/testers/etc to implement the change. This is simply an attempt to push people onto other formats. Why should Adobe care how much this breaks? They don't have to pay the cost of updating an old projects. [1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-software/#comment-746 http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-soft...

Black101 5y ago
> Software has a significant advantage over things that have to be made in the real world: it doesn't degrade over time it does degrade over time... at one point you have to use emulators to be able to run them
coliveira 5y ago
But even if the software is finished, Adobe has the problem of supporting it in each new version of its multiple applications. I think their goal here is to cut down on backwards maintenance costs. After all, you can continue to use Type1 fonts with existing software, as you mention.
- slver 5y ago
  > After all, you can continue to use Type1 fonts with existing software, as you mention. The thing you miss is that according to the parent, every piece of old software is useful and finished, except the ones they want the latest updates on. /s
slver 5y ago
> Software has a significant advantage over things that have to be made in the real world: it doesn't degrade over time. That's the conventional wisdom, but actually it's wrong in every possible sense. Software is an inseparable part of its ecosystem, and the ecosystem is always evolving. Decay is not a property of the physical world. It's a property of complex systems in general, be it natural or artificial. > Software doesn't become a liability that should be removed simply by being old. > Adobe's library of code for handing Type 1 fonts should have reached this "finished" state a long time ago. The maintenance cost of the Type 1 font feature should have been very close to zero. By your own logic, you can just stick to using old Adobe software. Problem solved. And you're wrong about Type 1 support being "finished". Given Type 1 isn't supported by any recent OS (and never was on mobile OS), it basically is a feature on its own, that has to be extended and maintained every time the software wants to make use of a new OS level font support feature, because both need to have parity. Adobe stopped supporting it because the de-facto standard today is OpenType. Adobe doesn't want to "push" anyone to OpenType. It has no financial incentive to. So you basically spun a conspiracy theory that is wrong in all possible ways at once.

by pdkl95 5y ago

Black101 5y ago

> Software has a significant advantage over things that have to be made in the real world: it doesn't degrade over time it does degrade over time... at one point you have to use emulators to be able to run them

coliveira 5y ago

But even if the software is finished, Adobe has the problem of supporting it in each new version of its multiple applications. I think their goal here is to cut down on backwards maintenance costs. After all, you can continue to use Type1 fonts with existing software, as you mention.

slver 5y ago
> After all, you can continue to use Type1 fonts with existing software, as you mention. The thing you miss is that according to the parent, every piece of old software is useful and finished, except the ones they want the latest updates on. /s

slver 5y ago

> Software has a significant advantage over things that have to be made in the real world: it doesn't degrade over time. That's the conventional wisdom, but actually it's wrong in every possible sense. Software is an inseparable part of its ecosystem, and the ecosystem is always evolving. Decay is not a property of the physical world. It's a property of complex systems in general, be it natural or artificial. > Software doesn't become a liability that should be removed simply by being old. > Adobe's library of code for handing Type 1 fonts should have reached this "finished" state a long time ago. The maintenance cost of the Type 1 font feature should have been very close to zero. By your own logic, you can just stick to using old Adobe software. Problem solved. And you're wrong about Type 1 support being "finished". Given Type 1 isn't supported by any recent OS (and never was on mobile OS), it basically is a feature on its own, that has to be extended and maintained every time the software wants to make use of a new OS level font support feature, because both need to have parity. Adobe stopped supporting it because the de-facto standard today is OpenType. Adobe doesn't want to "push" anyone to OpenType. It has no financial incentive to. So you basically spun a conspiracy theory that is wrong in all possible ways at once.