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Ask HN: Is Software Getting Worse?

• the_third_wave 4y ago
  The given examples are no so much about software getting worse but specifically web programming to do so. Here the answer is clearly yes, web programming is in a suboptimal phase at the moment with web programmers acting more like carpenters who try to cobble up a house using only IKEA flat-packed products which they jury-rig together using copious amounts of glue, packing tape and baling twine than like the artisan of old who went into the woods with an axe and built himself a log cabin. True, the log cabin was rather spartan but it it kept out the elements and lasted a long time. The IKEA mansion has all the furnishings you want and some of them even work, sometimes. Often they don't, the lights go dim when you want them bright or end up blinding you just when you dozed off in bed, the dishwasher only works when the washing machine is first switched on and off, the doorbell rings day and night except for when someone is actually at the door, etc. Blame the enormous amount of churn in the web tool world, the chase after the latest fads, the fact that many 'web programmers' entered this field not so much because they like the intellectual challenge of solving puzzles but because it pays well, the fact that project targets keep on moving or whatever. Commercial software is getting 'worse' in that the distinction between customer and product is disappearing. A product is that what is made by a company in order to sell it to a customer so the company gets to make money. A customer is he who buys a product from a company because he deems it fit for some purpose. That was then but now things have changed. Final sales are making way for rental agreements, products are turning into advertising and data mining applications to be used by companies to herd and milk their customers. Customers are thus productised and sold to other companies who target them with directed advertising based on what was harvested earlier. Free software is still mostly freed from this plague - although even there it sometimes shows up, e.g. the Shopping lens [1] which appeared in Ubuntu 12.04 and only recently disappeared was an unwelcome reminder of this phenomenon - so there is a way out.
• dogleash 4y ago
  Yea, ofc. There's just a lot going on all at once. And some of it is honest to god huge quality of life improvements, which impose guard rails around piles of garbage and creates reluctance to see or acknowledge very real negatives.
• helmsb 4y ago
  I think the issue is the incentives have shifted over the years. A lot of software today is built to drive a specific user behavior to generate revenue instead of being designed from the start to provide customer value. User-hostile behavior, dark patterns, etc. are all a symptom of this. Additionally time-to-market and marketing bullet points are often more important than user experience of bug-free software because many companies have found they can make the same revenue without having to focus on the customer experience. Classic software was not as big-free as people like to think. There was lots of BAD software. The difference was that with higher prices and the inability to push updates (aside from mailing floppies) meant that the incentive was to produce software that had fewer bugs.
• WirelessGigabit 4y ago
  Yes, I believe so. There is an endless push to get your data. Prompts to subscribe. For example, I have a BlackVue camera. App used to work great. Now I get a prompt to subscribe to their paid system. Why? I Paid for a webcam, and knew that the online service was paid, but then it was my choice. Now they are coercing me.
• chrismcb 4y ago
  No. It isn't in decline. Saying it is in decline assumes there was a period of time where it was better. There are a lot of bad programmers out there. There is, and always had been a lot of bad software
• codingdave 4y ago
  Honestly, I think the answer is no. But the sheer amount of software in our world is increasing. So if software quality lands on a bell curve, you'll see the lower end of that curve more often. Which actually argues that software quality is increasing - when so much of it "just works", the ones that don't stand out.
  • ASalazarMX 4y ago
    I lean to yes, because even things that formerly worked, fail without good reason. If feels like quality is not a top priority anymore, and I think that trend started with network patches, suddenly you could sell unfinished software while you still work at it. For example, the most recent update to iBooks from Apple glitches if you rotate the screen, and stays that way even if you rotate it back. iBooks is an app that recently got a tiny facelift, yet no one tested what happens if you flip the phone. I agree that we use more software now, so we should experience more buggy software, but if that was the case, we should have experienced the same proportion of buggy software all our life. I still think easy patching facilitated bad quality practices, although those bad practices probably make commercial sense.
    • ASalazarMX 3y ago
      Te most recent update fixed this issue. While the easy workaround was loking rotation inside iBooks preferences, I much prefer for it to follow the orientation. That was fast, which is the bright side of network patches.
  • thesz 4y ago
    For software quality to have bell curve distribution, you have to define negative software quality first and then proceed to define inifinite qualities also. Otherwise it is either one-sided distribution (when there is no negative quality) or bounded distribution. Both cases have no guarantee to have sums of independent variables to converge to a bell curve. Log-normal distribution certainly does not converge to normal distribution however hard you try [1]. [1] https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/238529/the-sum-of-independent-lognormal-random-variables-appears-lognormal https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/238529/the-sum-of-... Which brings up the question: what is negative software quality? Can we define that?
• eimrine 4y ago
  I agree with the result of your research but examples are really poor.
• s1k3s 4y ago
  We never reached quality on mobile UX for websites. Not because it can't be done (see Wikipedia or apple.com) but because it seems like we don't want it. Social media websites are total crap, presumably because they want you to use the app where they can harvest a lot more data than inside your sandboxed browser. News sites and listing sites earn money from ads, and it's now some sort of standard practice to force your users to see/click on them with those gotcha popups and parallax effects. And then there's websites that appear not to care enough to do something about it, like HN which is usable but could be done better. So overall I don't think it's getting worse but it's always been bad on mobile for whatever reason.
• rco8786 4y ago
  > Is software quality in decline? No, you just have a skewed memory of some time when software was "good". Remember Windows ME?
  • danybittel 4y ago
    I somewhat disagree. As an avid Visual Studio user.. it's definitly gotton worse. A lot of little Editor UX things seem to stop working. Example: in C++, writing switch(..) on an enum would automatically default create all switch cases. Then later versions, it only occasionally did it, now it doesn't do it at all. Another example: When my application finishes and VS is activated, sometimes the cursor is in one window, but typing happens in another. Another example: In Windows 11, when resizing a window, the artifacts seem to have gotton worse. Sometimes even the whole window is flickering.
    • bsuvc 4y ago
      There are better alternatives UX-wise for both of the examples you gave. Visual Studio -> Jetbrains. Windows 11 -> Linux (or Mac) While VS and Windows have gotten worse in recent years, other software like Jetbrains IDEs and Linux UX have gotten better.
      • danybittel 4y ago
        Well maybe. But these alternatives come with their own set of problems. I guess it's a tradeoff.. how much can a software degrade until you're willing to learn and deal with another set of problems. Unfortunalty, you kind of get used to UX quirks. I have to say though, all in all Win 11 is not as bad as people make it out to be. After turning off a few things, it stops getting in the way. I'm definitly going to have another look at Jetbrains though.
      • fhd2 4y ago
        Not sure why this is downvoted - I also have the experience that Linux on the desktop now vs 10 years ago is a much better experience, both UX wise (at least in general, though it's a bit subjective), but also in terms of stability. From what I've scrolled through so far, most examples people give of software that got worse is by Microsoft, though I wouldn't say it's limited to them. There seems to be a desperation for profit in commercial software right now like nothing I've seen in the past. There's usually alternatives worth a look though!
• loxdalen 4y ago
  TikTok is designed to get people to download the app, so it's intentional.
  • pantulis 4y ago
    Underrated comment.
• mantas 4y ago
  Define quality software. Making money for the business? Improving customer's life? But who is customer? The one interacting with it or paying for it?
• emu7652 4y ago
  In some sense in some aspects - yes software is getting worse. For example optimisation. A lot of practices that been utilized today from "code standards" to "convince over cleaver solutions" we lose about 10 years of hardware evolution when it comes to overall performance. Of course there are exceptions. And this is just single example of software getting worse
• paulgb 4y ago
  I think two things are happening. One is the “things aint built like they used to be” bias — buildings from the past that are physically well built are the ones that don’t get torn down, so we associate the past with the sturdy stone buildings instead of the clapboard houses. The other is that you are right. We keep pushing rendering engines originally designed to render hypertext into a de facto operating system, so even basic software like a real estate site or video player has to deal with a bunch of accidental complexity that the equivalent desktop software from 1999 didn’t have to. It’s worth noting that both your examples are browser-based apps, not desktop or systems software.
• an_aparallel 4y ago
  you gave 2 large companies as examples. There's SO MUCH incredible software out these days...better than anything thats come before it...software is getting better - media harvesting is getting worse. So...support good companies, and make a point of not supporting the ones which do this. It comes at a cost - but - that's life. for creators, particularly in music - we've never had it better... PAID -Ableton blows my mind - every time i touch it. -So does FL studio FREE -Surge XT - most incredible free software synthesizer going -Vital - a free version of Serum which sounds incredible. -Ardour - a free protools stand in. -Air Windows - tonnes of audio processing plugins -Variety of Sound - beautiful UIs, awesome sound. -Blender...holy shit... i could go on..
  • Gordonjcp 4y ago
    DaVinci Resolve. Proper video editing, VFX, and colour grading software as used on stuff you've seen in the cinema and on telly. Free, if you don't want the clever "neural engine" stuff or >4k timelines. Oh, you do want that? That'll be 300 quid then, and it's yours for life. They have never even charged for the updates, either. Of course, they make their money on cameras and control surfaces.
    • an_aparallel 4y ago
      here.. more free software which rocks: OBS Screen Recorder, Obsidian Mind Mapping Software, Mock Mechanic (free engineering sandbox), Ranstads Circuit Modelling JS site, Inkscape - getting better and better
    • d23 4y ago
      DaVinci and Ableton are both good examples to me. I love Ableton and use it a ton, but man does it crash almost every session for me. I finally bit the bullet and bought Resolve to use some of its non free effects and have already run into a number of bugs. I’m still very grateful I have access to that level of software, but it does feel like things being 90% complete at best is the standard these days.
      • timrichard 4y ago
• dusted 4y ago
  Yes. There's no incentive to make good software from a business perspective. Sure, most developers worth their salt would love to do it, but it's not what they're paid to do.
• sjadoinqwoeihad 4y ago
  Software complexity is increasing. With the increased complexity many failure modes are not understood by developers. Thus those failures are not handled gracefully. This feels like a decline in quality. Depending on what you measure the quality could actually be better, the same or worse.
  • robinsonb5 4y ago
    Furthermore, with software built as a teetering jenga-tower of abstraction layers and frameworks the actual error often isn't even propogated as far as the UI - and instead of a description of the problem we get "Oops, something went wrong." This inscrutability of modern software is one of my biggest pet peeves with it. There was a time when the resource-limitations of computers forced software to be much simpler - and the end result was that when things went wrong, someone with sufficient time and motivation could sift through the rubble, figure out what the problem is, and often lash up some kind of workaround. That's getting harder and harder to do these days. Likewise, in the open-source world, the breadth of dependencies is getting out of hand - I've lost count of the number of times I've tried to build something and had to go on half a dozen side-quests to track down a particular version of a particular build tool because the version in my distro is either too new or too old.
• hxelk1 4y ago
  I feel your pain. I think software is certainly getting much more complex (because it can, not because it has to). Complexity comes with a cost. I hate when a mostly static website is rendered completely client side, for example. Most of the time, I just want to read the text, maybe see some (non-marketing) images, and that's it. I don't want hundreds of kilobytes of JS executed on my machine just for that.
• numbchuckskills 4y ago
  [dead]
• adverbly 4y ago
  Yes. Software naturally declines unless it is maintained.
• negative_zero 4y ago
  To me as a user, what's in decline is UI, UX and trust. Lots of software these days is just outright hostile in very "in your factface ways" and subtle ways. Even software I pay for seems to try to screw me at every turn. "You paid for me? Have some ads! I'll scan everything you do and sell it off to the highest bidder! No you can't copy and send this image to a friend, but here's a link to try and lure them into the walled garden so I can data rape them too. Stay in my eco system it's great. You love it here! Click click click keeping clicking. Moar data to sell! Give moar! Data breach! I'm soz (but no compensation for you." Oh and when you live off grid with little power you learn to hate electron apps. They are such power wasters. Three things cause my inverter to spin up its cooling fans: games, windows updates and electron apps. (And of course if you have "AC" plugged in most apps seem to think its a damn free for all for power. So its more power efficient to charge powered down and only run using battery if possible).
  • newswasboring 4y ago
    > data rape No. Just, No.
• hammyhavoc 4y ago
  "Experts say yes."
• andyish 4y ago
  People don't want to pay for 'good' software, so you get more and more corners cut until you end up with something that nearly unusable (or more likely, just not very good).
• pydry 4y ago
  Certain kinds are, I think. I've noticed that when I log in to [ well known ecommerce website ] these days it tells me that I have -1 pending orders. It isn't the only bug like that. With this one as with many others I think it's because a lot are worked on by multiple teams and a lot of bugs get stuck in a kind of "no man's land" between teams where nobody is really responsible.
• imgabe 4y ago
  Solitaire on Windows 3.1 started almost instantly and did exactly what you wanted. Solitaire on Windows 10 is a laggy behemoth that won't even work if you aren't connected to the Internet. Nobody asked for solitaire to be connected to the Internet. It's absurd that a program should be so much slower on machines that are literally about 1000x faster.
  • XorNot 4y ago
    Microsoft in general has consistently had a problem with dropping blocking network IO "stuff" into it's applications - i.e. it's always been absurd that Explorer will just lock right up if it hits network lag when doing SMB browsing.
    • thefz 4y ago
      Discovered this the hard way while diagnosing heavy Teams latency in the UI while Pihole was blocking MS telemetry.
    • alpaca128 4y ago
      Same with Mac OS constantly asking Apple whether it's fine to start a program. Which was fun not long ago when that Apple server went down and people couldn't start programs anymore as long as the Mac was connected to the internet because Apple of course couldn't imagine their own creation being fallible.
      • joenot443 4y ago
        Are you talking about gatekeeper flags or app signatures? As far as I know, both of those can be managed locally, I don’t think Apple is informed every time you try to open a process.
        • alpaca128 4y ago
          I have no idea how it's called but it is a very noticeable effect and also happens whenever I run a freshly compiled executable for the first time. It usually causes a delay of about 0.5-5 seconds depending on the wifi connection. Which is kind of insane, to upgrade to a literally 3 times faster machine and then it sometimes runs slower than before. And not network-related but still annoying is Mac OS' habit of always spinning up connected harddrives each time a "save file" dialog opens, which causes that dialog to be completely unresponsive until all drives are ready. Save a file and the most expensive Mac can be bottlenecked by a single external HDD. It's just so unnecessary.
• bullen 4y ago
  The physical world has peaked, in every metric. That makes software harder. Just wait until you can't buy a new computer just like that. Stick to vanilla Java/C+/HTML(5)/JSON/OpenGL/AL and make something great and you'll be fine. Note + is NOT a typo: it means C++ compiler with mostly C syntax. I only use string, stream and namespaces. Classes very rarely. Don't download things that are >1GB.
  • Havoc 4y ago
    >The physical world has peaked, in every metric. How do you figure that? Seems to me that things are still rapidly changing. Starlink, fusion, JWST, computer hardware, 3D printing etc...loads still happening.
    • bullen 4y ago
      All statistics show 2016 being peak in population growth in the western world. Acceleration stopped 1968. CPU improvements stalled around 2012. GPU around 1030 so in 2017. Energy is the master resource.
      • Havoc 4y ago
        You genuinely believe a CPU from 2023 to be no better than one from 2012?
        • eimrine 4y ago
          I really believe in that. We used to have 4 cores in 2012 plus and this is slightly different than 2 cores (hardware cryptorgaphy in 2012th processor was more noticeable for me than extra cores). Modern processors eats significantly less energy and can hold significantly more of RAM and that's all I can notice.
          • CyberDildonics 4y ago
            We used to have 4 cores in 2012 plus and this is slightly different than 2 cores It is double actually. Also there are CPUs with 64 cores now. Also in 2012 there were CPUs with more than 4 cores. that's all I can notice What you can notice is not real information when speed, cores and energy use can be quantified.
• laichzeit0 4y ago
  It's probably fair to say modern software should be seen as a disposable commodity. It doesn't have to be good or durable, but it should be cheap and abundantly available. If you're developing software, see your employer as a factory owner in China mass producing some low quality imitation product and you're the factory worker.
• nathias 4y ago
  no, its just optimized for adds not you
• Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  Reddit admitted to maintaining more than 10 different video players and most of them are broken one way or another. As a company, they apparently do not have the capabilities to fix this. Their website and app are used as examples to teach bad practices. ChatGPT, literally the biggest thing of the year, still has an incredibly amateurish website. Their auth UX is broken. They do not offer exporting conversations. You just see an infinite scroll list of previous conversations. It's a complete mess! Yes, indeed, almost no one cares about UI/UX anymore at all, let alone polishing it towards perfection. How did this happen? If yor product is "good enough", no one will care about the UI/UX. It's not an important distinguisher. Everyone keeps complaining about reddit, but everyone keeps using it. Same for ChatGPT.
• re-thc 4y ago
  Things have gone rogue. You can no longer tell a button is a button anymore or a link, menu, etc. So often have friends and family got lost wondering what to do. Oh you got to click on it? The visual clues are all gone. "Flat"... right. Too many things are rushed out the door. Too much focus has been placed on "features" "features" and more "features" and no polish. Every release there are new features and yet the old 1s still have lots of bugs :(
• ModernMech 4y ago
  The alarm app on Windows now asks me to sign into a Microsoft account, presumably so it can track me. I think that answers your question.
  • eimrine 4y ago
    Software becomes better but not for user? Alarm which can track someone seems like more advanced kind of alarm software from some points of view.
• dzek69 4y ago
  Almost nobody cares about the value to the user anymore. Value to the owner/seller of the product is what matters. This results in poor UX, apps spying you constantly, useless features and easy to fix bugfixes that aren't fixed in years. As a software developer I'm disappointed in this approach. If I can I try my best to produce the best experience for the end user, but in the end I can only get satisfaction in open source... But open source is sometimes hell too! Just recently I found super popular open source library that earns $200k each years from donations, but the its Github is filled with issues and PRs. Author doesn't care, the money flows anyway. It hurts to see most major issues are already fixed by PRs, but the author doesn't even bother to merge & release. Sad.
  • vanviegen 4y ago
    I'm curious which OSS project you're referring to. That doesn't sound typical at all.
  • roxgib 4y ago
    Please share the link so I can fork it and snag some of these sweet donations
  • mustache_kimono 4y ago
    > Almost nobody cares about the value to the user anymore. Value to the owner/seller of the product is what matters. I think the situation might be different if the expectation for software wasn't that it cost nothing.
• wilde 4y ago
  Software gets worse as it gets bigger. The classic measure is 15 or so bugs per 1000 lines of code. Most software companies have career ladders that reward building broad abstractions that affect most of the product / company. So people add layers of complicated middleware to have “broader impact”. So over time, you aren’t just subject to bugs in feature A. You’re subject to bugs in feature A and library B and framework C and injected monitoring D and so on for the same user action.
• ergonaught 4y ago
  Software is getting worse, yes, although to be fair and mildly abrasive: 1) If you haven't actually lived through the arc you can't really spot this so you invite "okay boomer" sniping if you point it out. 2) Knowledge does not update the genome, therefore knowledge transmission is A Hard Problem, therefore because "developing software" is not a small and formal discipline the lessons learned by experience are not reliably/effectively/efficiently/at-all transmitted to the newer "generation" of "developers". This gives the appearance of "not learning from mistakes" or "things degrading" but the reality is simply that everyone is always reinventing things they don't understand as a result. 3) There are too many people engaging in the act of producing software who shouldn't actually be doing it. This is true of all fields where demand outstrips supply. LLMs are going to solve this problem in a most unfortunate manner. 4) The reality that cannot be discussed is that "stupid" is a much larger problem than anyone realizes, it extends well into areas that people normally think of as "requiring high intelligence", and it exacerbates all of the above. 5) We incentivize and, for reasons already given, actually justify behaviors that also tend to produce this. Ex: I assure you that somewhere out there is a product manager with a drug habit desperate to find a way to turn hammers into smart devices with a subscription service, NOT because this will help people who use hammers, but because this will increase profits for a company that produces hammers. This is an objectively bad and harmful practice that we encourage daily. Soooooo, again, yep.
• d23 4y ago
  Definitely feels that way. Not sure if it’s No Country for Old Men phenomenon or not. In that vein and as a counterpoint: I remember thinking software like VLC and irfanview were great back in the day. Now, I find them both to be incredibly frustrating. I wonder if the bar for quality software has actually gone up. That being said, I never remember basic websites of the 90s being as buggy as the ones I run into on a regular basis today, so who knows.
• throwaway4good 4y ago
  No. Software is getting better and developers are more productive than ever. It is just that the goal the developers had is not what you assume (to let you view video as easily as possible) but instead onboard you as an active user of the app. If you try and use Facebook without being logged in you will have a similar experience.
• transcriptase 4y ago
  The year is 2036. I sit down at my 128 core 7 GHz computer with 1 Tb of DDR8 memory on my 10 gig fibre line. Discord and MS Teams still take 30 seconds to open.
  • eimrine 4y ago
    How did they managed to get 7GHz CPU? Was this nothing more than a marketing way to sell good old 3.5GHz crystals?
    • blep_ 4y ago
      It's like the thing where light bulb brightness is rated in watts, but it's not the amount of power actually used, it's how much power an incandescent bulb of the same brightness would use. Numbers all become meaningless around 2029 and CPUs are now sold as "as powerful as a 7 GHz CPU". No attempt is made to specify anything else about the hypothetical 7 GHz CPU.
• johlits 4y ago
  It's because we don't know when to stop.
• Havoc 4y ago
  Both of those are more web experiences than "software" in my books though the two are blurring. Web in general seems to be getting worse yes. Partly due to dark pattern-y BS but also because it's a hard problem. There are just so many combinations of configurations that it's hard to cover it all. See also those fingerprinting sites showing you're unique (your configuration)...that's effectively a measure of that diversity. I don't mind the latter. There is certainly a movement towards intentional user hostile designs though which is annoying
  • layer8 4y ago
    Desktop UI has also gotten worse, mostly due to the mobile/web influence. Peek desktop UI was 15-20 years ago.
• tm-guimaraes 4y ago
  The issue is rent seeking behaviour that spawns across our current capitalist systems. (No this is not a rant against capitalism or a pro communism statement, just a problem description) Basically our current capitalism system incentivises not "value creation" as an utopian version of capitalism would incentivise, but actually "rent seeking" aka "build a moat, capture users". Everyone is after guaranteed recurring revenue, and it is done by shackling you to the service being provided, check "right to repair" issues, check compatibility in software ecosystems. Someone builds a very good product, people migrate to it, they pay you money, maybe even pay you to keep using it (subscription), but how to you guarantee that they are not switching to something else? Add as much lock in as possible, or make it free so you can sell user data/put adds. All of these are not connected to the quality or "value" you are providing to customers, but rather into ways of keeping your moat / stop competition from rising. tragedy of the commons (and similiar issues) means that we can never have the utopian capitalist/free market world. Regulation is always needed to avoid such issues, but at the same time regulation can also backfire and instead create these moats/rent. The utopian Capitalist world, just like the utopian Communism cannot exist. And the end of the day, there can never be purity, and systems need continuous engineering/maintenance effort. In your example, TikTok want you to use the app, website is not a priority, they can't gather as much info there, it just exists so that someone using the app could send a video to someone without it. Also, it still needs a ton of bloat to still get as much info from you as they can. So, with less resources and with still wanting to spy on you as much as they can, it's normal that the video player might not work in all browser/OS/device combinations. Same shit across every product, now add things like speed of delivery of new features or new ways to spy being more important that performance/quality, and you get trash software.
• nextlevelwizard 4y ago
  Anyone who thinks: No, just watch the apps you use and sites you visit for a week and mark down whenever something fails or loads too long. You will very fast change your mind.
• Geenirvana 4y ago
  It's UX for me. Maybe because I am getting old and I can't keep up with latest "software trends" I literally had to google how to restart my phone the other day.
• cameronh90 4y ago
  In my opinion, software is getting much, much better. Twenty years ago, applications crashed all the time and there was no thought given to data recovery. For example, whilst writing this post, I accidentally clicked a link, then pressed back and Chrome hadn't lost my post. Back in the day, a mistimed backspace would irretrievably destroy your input. Video games frequently wouldn't work without messing with driver settings - how do I know if want to use glide or DX? Playing a video involved messing around with codecs and if you were unlucky, the video was actually just a virus that would completely own your computer. There is one major exception, which is websites. After the age of popups, but before the age of privacy warnings, there was this short window where you could just open a web page and it didn't have a whole bunch of crap you had to dismiss before you could access the content.
• quanticle 4y ago
  When was the last time you had to debug an IRQ conflict? I remember when "Plug and Play" was derisively nicknamed "Plug and Pray". Today, it all just works. When I'm assembling a computer, I don't have to set jumpers. I don't have to fiddle with making sure the boot drive is at the end of the IDE cable rather than the middle. I can just snap all the pieces together like Lego, hit the power button, and be assured that I'll get a bootable system (assuming, of course, that I haven't been a dolt and forgotten to plug the video card power cable in). When was the last time you had an application blue-screen/bugcheck/kernel panic your machine? Yes, Windows still blue-screens from time to time, but over the past decade, I've found that 100% of my blue-screens have been caused by faulty drivers, rather than application code or bugs in the OS itself. This wasn't always the case. I remember, on Windows 98, there was one particular game that my brother had (I think it was Reader Rabbit), which would repeatedly and reliably blue-screen the machine when we got to a certain level. I haven't seen any errors like that in more than decade. And even the driver blue-screens are getting better. I remember not too long ago, my Windows PC's monitor blinked off, then came back. When I looked in Event Viewer, I saw that the GPU driver had crashed and had been automatically restarted. This is something that still causes kernel panics on Linux and MacOS, but Windows just shrugs it off and keeps on chugging. With regards to Linux, when was the last time you had to mess with xorg.conf? Wifi drivers? WPA supplicant? I remember when I had to download the Windows drivers for my wireless card, extract the binary blobs, compile NDISWrapper, and then pray that I'd set everything up correctly, before unplugging the Ethernet cable to test whether my wifi was working. Now? I browse Hacker News while Linux is installing, because wifi drivers have been part of the kernel for years. As for programming tools, they're more stable, robust, and widely available than ever. When was the last time you had to pay for a compiler, interpreter or language runtime? When was the last time GCC or LLVM crashed? Today one can write code in C, C++, Java, Python, Go, Rust, and a plethora of other languages... all for free, even on Windows! This is a huge improvement from the bad old days when your choices were to either pay for Borland or pay for Visual Studio. And as for web programming, do you really pine for the days when your only option for a backend language was a collection of perl scripts in `cgi-bin`? The one regression, in my opinion, is with communication software. We used to have open (or "open-enough" i.e. reverse engineered) protocols that enabled multi-protocol, multi-platform clients such as Pidgin. That world is gone. Our communications are now siloed into proprietary, hostile software stacks, such as Slack, Google Meet and Teams. And our personal communications are siloed between Discord, WhatsApp, and the multifarious other messenger apps that we have to install in order to communicate with that one person who refuses to use anything else. But other than comms, has software improved? I have a hard time arguing otherwise.
• alpaca128 4y ago
  Yes, and it's not just basic quality but also a lack of thoughtful implementation. For example "smart" IoT lightbulbs that do firmware updates during the night, when having some light would be kinda nice. I especially find it frustrating how software gets more sluggish while at the same time we're making 500Hz screens, VR etc which should actually encourage the opposite.
• lonelyasacloud 4y ago
  What I interacted with twenty years ago did less, operated on fewer device types, required a great deal more developer expertise and effort to create even simple applications. Commercial software was distributed largely on physical media with a buy it and own it business model (no freemium, ad-supported) and the development processes was largely based on those from the hardware world, i.e no agile. For most software all of that has changed and it comes with a cost.
• Shomon 4y ago
  [flagged]
• p0w3n3d 4y ago
  My opinion is: software is building on higher- and higher-level components, and people don't know what's happening inside, hence they are not aware of the border cases. Testing is getting much more difficult. Also https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/