4 ms·

I think our fundamental disconnect is that you see a world in which all software is unique, special, and does completely different things. I see a world where e

I think our fundamental disconnect is that you see a world in which all software is unique, special, and does completely different things. I see a world where every website I use has the same stupid follow button that does the same stupid thing, where every navbar comes with a logout button, where every social media app is trying to look like the demon spawn of Clubhouse and Snapchat. I see a world where every single mobile app wraps a UITableView with a few changed properties. You're trying to tell me that there are thousands of engineers out there designing cars with alternatives to gas pedals and steering wheels, and yet every car off the line still has the same gas pedal and the same steering wheel from 20 years ago. It just isn't reality. Almost all of this stuff is cloning existing stuff and tacking on some new feature. "But steering wheels today have so many more buttons!" Okay. Take a steering wheel, add some buttons to it. Is it really that alien from a steering wheel without buttons? And yeah! That new feature, that nobody has ever done before? You'll need to describe it to hell and back. Because of course the computer won't know what you're talking about. But the point is to get you 80% or 90% of the way there using common language, from there you can hire developers to finish the feature themselves or you can write a design spec for the computer to build. And now that the computer knows the feature? Well, you can create derivative works off that stored knowledge, and you won't have to spend your time writing the boilerplate and scaffolding needed to support that feature. I don't think I'm disregarding how complex the world is, I think you're disregarding how utterly predictable software is.

ozim 5y ago
Everything you describe from my perspective is already solved. *Every social media app...* - I have worked on warehouse automation projects, worked on multiple "specialists help tools" where logout button or just putting a text box was negligible effort. Building HN like site - for me solved problem - there is bunch of clones on GitHub you can "git pull" and have it running in minutes. With docker it is even faster. There is Wordpress, Salesforce you name it, you don't need to have any code and no low code. Hosting providers let you setup whole blog/e-commerce site with a single click. In MailChimp I can create landing page with working email form without even knowing that HTML exists. Using any of the frameworks like Rails or Django gives you that 80% or 90% that you describe, login/logout for free no coding. So if you just want to put some buttons and text boxes it is all solved already. What developers are busy is filling in those 10% gaps that you point out, because it is still complicated and one has to understand things from multiple angles.
- nexuist 5y ago
  Using open source code and tools doesn't work if you don't know how to code. Paying someone else to do the work for you is no different from the current model and makes you dependent on their company leadership and business model. The best software development tool would be the one that replaces both of these. > What developers are busy is filling in those 10% gaps that you point out, because it is still complicated and one has to understand things from multiple angles. But to get 90% of the way there is not as trivial as you are making it out to be. The smallest useful software projects take weeks, anything with some amount of complexity is at least a few months or years. Even with Rails nobody is pumping out a PoC in under 6 hours. The goal is to make it take hours what used to take years with hundreds of thousands of dollars in dev costs.
  - ozim 5y ago
    This complexity does not come from "coding is hard" and developers writing "basic elements from scratch". It all comes from requirements that business has and that world is complex. I am just re-reading "No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accident in Software Engineering" by Fred Brooks. Everything that I am writing about is not simply my ideas, but something that is understood in the industry. That developers more and more don't address accidental complexity but essential complexity that is those 10% that you mention. Even if that was written in 1987 - I totally agree with what is written there, because there is no General AI in sight that would do what you expect. All of it is even more so true with all the things I mentioned earlier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet

ozim 5y ago

Everything you describe from my perspective is already solved. *Every social media app...* - I have worked on warehouse automation projects, worked on multiple "specialists help tools" where logout button or just putting a text box was negligible effort. Building HN like site - for me solved problem - there is bunch of clones on GitHub you can "git pull" and have it running in minutes. With docker it is even faster. There is Wordpress, Salesforce you name it, you don't need to have any code and no low code. Hosting providers let you setup whole blog/e-commerce site with a single click. In MailChimp I can create landing page with working email form without even knowing that HTML exists. Using any of the frameworks like Rails or Django gives you that 80% or 90% that you describe, login/logout for free no coding. So if you just want to put some buttons and text boxes it is all solved already. What developers are busy is filling in those 10% gaps that you point out, because it is still complicated and one has to understand things from multiple angles.

nexuist 5y ago
Using open source code and tools doesn't work if you don't know how to code. Paying someone else to do the work for you is no different from the current model and makes you dependent on their company leadership and business model. The best software development tool would be the one that replaces both of these. > What developers are busy is filling in those 10% gaps that you point out, because it is still complicated and one has to understand things from multiple angles. But to get 90% of the way there is not as trivial as you are making it out to be. The smallest useful software projects take weeks, anything with some amount of complexity is at least a few months or years. Even with Rails nobody is pumping out a PoC in under 6 hours. The goal is to make it take hours what used to take years with hundreds of thousands of dollars in dev costs.
- ozim 5y ago
  This complexity does not come from "coding is hard" and developers writing "basic elements from scratch". It all comes from requirements that business has and that world is complex. I am just re-reading "No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accident in Software Engineering" by Fred Brooks. Everything that I am writing about is not simply my ideas, but something that is understood in the industry. That developers more and more don't address accidental complexity but essential complexity that is those 10% that you mention. Even if that was written in 1987 - I totally agree with what is written there, because there is no General AI in sight that would do what you expect. All of it is even more so true with all the things I mentioned earlier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet