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Here's a summary of the video: Casey Muratori makes the point that we've had phenomenal growth in hardware power, but our software is not correspondingly bette

Here's a summary of the video: Casey Muratori makes the point that we've had phenomenal growth in hardware power, but our software is not correspondingly better. Computers should be much more pleasant to use. We all know what he's talking about: laggy software, crashes, updates, driver issues, etc. Things are no longer coded from scratch - we pile code on top of code on top of code. Features accumulate, together with complexity - and bugs. How many lines of code does it take to read a text file, in a web browser? Across the whole stack - browser, website, OS, router - he estimates 56 million LoC. The OS alone takes 30 million lines of code! And yet, in the 90s, demo writers routinely produced literal operating systems on a single floppy disk. Remember Amiga demos? They 'hit the metal' because they weren't hobbled by drivers and other abstractions. But as hardware developed, the manufacturers removed that access, forcing developers to work through abstractions. A SoC is a super powered 1980s home computer, but we can't actually reach that hardware. And it's up to hardware people to start taking this problem seriously. And now my comments: Apple is one of those manufacturers. This article hit a nerve with me, because I dumped iOS development; because of the complexity and insanity. Swift is a sprawling behemoth of a language now, hugely complex, full of gotchas. In some senses, it has to be - because it's a reflection of the hardware. I'm not going to elaborate more. Quite simply: you can't program your iDevice, EVER, without going through Apple's prescribed programming language(s), frameworks, libraries, LLVM, and hardware drivers. That's Apple's fault. Computing should not be like this.

flohofwoe 3y ago
> And yet, in the 90s, demo writers routinely produced literal operating systems on a single floppy disk. Remember Amiga demos? They 'hit the metal' because they weren't hobbled by drivers and other abstractions. That was possible because the hardware was essentially a "game engine API" (e.g. the hardware was designed to be conveniently used directly, and was also designed with game requirements in mind). Whether that's good or bad is definitely debatable, for instance on the Amiga the need for hardware backward compatibility because of popular games that directly accessed the hardware was definitely stalling the Amiga's progress in the 90's. I don't disagree with most of your points though. We're definitely in an age of unnecessary software bloat, but I think the answer isn't to go back to accessing hardware directly. A lot can be gained by just applying some common sense when writing code. PS: Apple or the iPhone definitely isn't at fault though. The mess already started with the PC and Windows (but this mess also gave us increadibly fast hardware progress in the second half of the 90's by allowing hardware to evolve faster because of driver abstraction layers).
Apocryphon 3y ago
Mobile development, let alone iOS, is a substantially small amount of programming. Bizarre to blame Apple specifically, let alone Objective-C. It seems like you would just as easily be unhappy with web development or Android development as you would be with iOS development.

flohofwoe 3y ago

> And yet, in the 90s, demo writers routinely produced literal operating systems on a single floppy disk. Remember Amiga demos? They 'hit the metal' because they weren't hobbled by drivers and other abstractions. That was possible because the hardware was essentially a "game engine API" (e.g. the hardware was designed to be conveniently used directly, and was also designed with game requirements in mind). Whether that's good or bad is definitely debatable, for instance on the Amiga the need for hardware backward compatibility because of popular games that directly accessed the hardware was definitely stalling the Amiga's progress in the 90's. I don't disagree with most of your points though. We're definitely in an age of unnecessary software bloat, but I think the answer isn't to go back to accessing hardware directly. A lot can be gained by just applying some common sense when writing code. PS: Apple or the iPhone definitely isn't at fault though. The mess already started with the PC and Windows (but this mess also gave us increadibly fast hardware progress in the second half of the 90's by allowing hardware to evolve faster because of driver abstraction layers).

Apocryphon 3y ago

Mobile development, let alone iOS, is a substantially small amount of programming. Bizarre to blame Apple specifically, let alone Objective-C. It seems like you would just as easily be unhappy with web development or Android development as you would be with iOS development.