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Programming languages. Developer tooling. Debuggers. Cross platform libraries. Everything could be orders of magnitude better than what we have today. But our w

by gizmo 3y ago

Programming languages. Developer tooling. Debuggers. Cross platform libraries. Everything could be orders of magnitude better than what we have today. But our world is ruled by pragmatism, and duck-taping mediocre technologies together results in barely "good enough" solutions that make money and solve real world problems. Even open source suffers from the same problem. Making really high quality software takes 10 times the effort (if not more) and nobody is willing to make that investment up front. And so half-baked software becomes popular and now we spend years or decades and untold hours trying to turn bad software into pretty good software without completely breaking backwards compatibility. The root cause is probably the incrementalist approach we take to developing software. We start with something small because of time constraints or because we don't really understand the problem yet. Once the software has users who demand bug fixes and feature additions and this results in software organically growing instead of being intelligently designed for a purpose. As a result, you get stuck in a local maximum. And that's how we spend 500,000 hours debating strategies for removing the GIL (global interpreter lock) in Python when the first version of Python was made 30 years ago as a side project during a holiday break.

Dioxide2119 3y ago
> The root cause is probably the incrementalist approach we take to developing software. I would blame the "unix philosophy" and "worse is better" approaches of the past, but I bet they were more symptomatic than causal, and their equivalents in other digital realms pop up all the time: IBM vs clones, unix wars, protocol wars, at various times its fights between 'official' (described as stuffy) vs 'pragmatic' (described as lax/crappy) definitions of stuff. I'd hazard a guess that since (for those of us who are young and therefore spew confident sounding incorrect speculation like this comment) we still have so much of the old 'it works, ship it' hacker groups of the 70s in our past, then the overreach of the CASE / UML / XML fever of the late 90s which we have in turn overreacted against by going too far in the 'look its a containerized k8s pod running behind a reverse proxy that runs some react and uses leftpad to graphql your (must always be online) user information record in this headless electron because SHIP IT' direction. PS: our historical 'its good enough' precedent didn't help, we've been trapped on 'very fast PDP-11s' for decades. Even BWK and the other forerunners of our modern C + unixlike stack weren't able to get us un-stuck from that stack and so plan 9 etc. failed to catch on. The Lindy Effect is a double-edged sword for sure.

by gizmo 3y ago

Dioxide2119 3y ago

> The root cause is probably the incrementalist approach we take to developing software. I would blame the "unix philosophy" and "worse is better" approaches of the past, but I bet they were more symptomatic than causal, and their equivalents in other digital realms pop up all the time: IBM vs clones, unix wars, protocol wars, at various times its fights between 'official' (described as stuffy) vs 'pragmatic' (described as lax/crappy) definitions of stuff. I'd hazard a guess that since (for those of us who are young and therefore spew confident sounding incorrect speculation like this comment) we still have so much of the old 'it works, ship it' hacker groups of the 70s in our past, then the overreach of the CASE / UML / XML fever of the late 90s which we have in turn overreacted against by going too far in the 'look its a containerized k8s pod running behind a reverse proxy that runs some react and uses leftpad to graphql your (must always be online) user information record in this headless electron because SHIP IT' direction. PS: our historical 'its good enough' precedent didn't help, we've been trapped on 'very fast PDP-11s' for decades. Even BWK and the other forerunners of our modern C + unixlike stack weren't able to get us un-stuck from that stack and so plan 9 etc. failed to catch on. The Lindy Effect is a double-edged sword for sure.