4 ms·

We have way too much empathy for bad software. Honestly, it's almost all total shit. If my care was as bad as the median level of software, it would last 30 day

We have way too much empathy for bad software. Honestly, it's almost all total shit. If my care was as bad as the median level of software, it would last 30 days and then be broken down in my driveway until the scrapper hauls it off.

kaba0 4y ago
What part of the stack you think of? Because my experience is that the underlying stuff Just Works^TM. Sure, it does have the occasional hiccup, but 1 out of 1000, it is some higher level tool that has a bug. Just to share the terminology, under underlying stuff I mean the linux kernel, the JVM, etc, while higher level stuff could be certain build tools (khm, looking at you npm), and of course end user tools that are unfortunately way too buggy. Like I have a hard time listing end user applications where I didn’t notice a bug yet.
hinkley 4y ago
I feel like there's an opportunity missed here with the transition to clustering for us to build a small kernel for running simple services and moving things over to run on top of these things. Give me a tight, highly coherent API, with a culture of avoiding feature factory work. At least get "Make it work, make it right, make it fast" to not skip "make it right" anymore. That's sort of the core illness in software today. Open source doesn't have to be pushed by business concerns. There's a degree of regulatory capture, but the biggest problem is that we just don't know any better. We repeat what we see, and make sure our own pain points are handled. I've seen this play out in API design where an awful API is introduced, and each person who fixes it only fixes 20% of the pain, and so it's 10 years before we get from a mediocre library to one you could actually call 'good', because nobody made 'good', they made better than better than better than ridiculous.

4 ms·

We have way too much empathy for bad software. Honestly, it's almost all total shit. If my care was as bad as the median level of software, it would last 30 day

by patrick451 4y ago

kaba0 4y ago
What part of the stack you think of? Because my experience is that the underlying stuff Just Works^TM. Sure, it does have the occasional hiccup, but 1 out of 1000, it is some higher level tool that has a bug. Just to share the terminology, under underlying stuff I mean the linux kernel, the JVM, etc, while higher level stuff could be certain build tools (khm, looking at you npm), and of course end user tools that are unfortunately way too buggy. Like I have a hard time listing end user applications where I didn’t notice a bug yet.
hinkley 4y ago
I feel like there's an opportunity missed here with the transition to clustering for us to build a small kernel for running simple services and moving things over to run on top of these things. Give me a tight, highly coherent API, with a culture of avoiding feature factory work. At least get "Make it work, make it right, make it fast" to not skip "make it right" anymore. That's sort of the core illness in software today. Open source doesn't have to be pushed by business concerns. There's a degree of regulatory capture, but the biggest problem is that we just don't know any better. We repeat what we see, and make sure our own pain points are handled. I've seen this play out in API design where an awful API is introduced, and each person who fixes it only fixes 20% of the pain, and so it's 10 years before we get from a mediocre library to one you could actually call 'good', because nobody made 'good', they made better than better than better than ridiculous.