7 ms·

Is Software Getting Worse?

65 points by kungfudoi 3y ago

khedoros1 3y ago
> DOOM, which came out in 1996 1993.
svaha1728 3y ago
Fair number of apps out there running on a skeleton crew after a successful acquisition.
jrm4 3y ago
It really is the "how do you pay for it" question, always, no? How do you incentivize quality? We've seen two approaches that definitely don't work super well to deliver consistent quality. One is "proprietary, make people buy per unit" and the other is "free and open source." (And note: I say the latter as a huge FLOSS fan. I'll still push it all day -- but only because I think freedom is more fundamental than quality in this regard; preserve freedom first, then we can think about quality control.)
- drewcoo 3y ago
  If we're talking about "how do you pay for it," then there are not just two models. Closed source products can be sold outright, rented, subsidized via ads, some combination of those, and more. They can even be given away as tax write-offs or loss leaders or somesuch. All of those models also exist for open source products! It turns out that customers aren't paying for source access so much as they're paying for working software. No one can agree about what "quality" actually is. Mostly, it's a word used as a weapon whenever someone wants to bully change into happening. Or not happening, for that matter. But a weapon either way.
  - jrm4 3y ago
    Of course, I didn't mean to suggest that there were only two at all, just that "here are two that DON'T work for this." Good point on "quality," it makes a lot of sense to try to look at the thing we're talking about here without talking about "quality" or "software." There are problems and opportunities in this technological space; what good ways are there to handle those, noting that much of the work that needs to get done for them isn't likely to occur without payment? Something like that.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  Also: quality for whom? What Eloi consider quality and what Morlocks consider quality are, if not opposed, at least in strong competition due to opportunity cost. (if it's not obvious, I spend my efforts on quality for Morlocks, and am willing to leave the much-more-time-intensive quality for Eloi up to "the market")
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    One metric could be 'number of hard crashes per thousand end-user usage hours'.
troupo 3y ago
Yes, yes it is. The main problem is that we are okay with shipping unfinished barely-beta software because we can always force the upgrade/update/change. You didn't have that luxury when you were shipping software on a floppy disk/CD-ROM, and that was it: all the bugs and issues were there, forever.
javajosh 3y ago
It is a tremendous amount of work to tread on a new path. Although at times exciting, it's often just scary and you have a huge downside risk and only a minor upside benefit. Breaking with even one widely held assumption creates a huge burden and if you break with more than one, which I think is necessary, is exponentially harder. And there is no single project which benefits from this extra overhead. The impetus has to come from within and it's very personal like an artist feeling a need to express themselves no matter the cost.
bedobi 3y ago
Yeah it’s getting worse. As a commenter points out, we now have fucking chat and email clients that take up literal gigabytes of ram and who knows how much on disk, and despite orders of magnitude more computing power are slower than ever, which is idiotic. And self serving as it may be, I don’t believe it’s because of unskilled, lazy or noncommitted devs. Most devs do the best they can within the constraints imposed on them. When a PM comes with the latest idiotic pet feature that isn’t as much for actual users as to pad their resume and enable them to climb the next step on their career ladder, devs have to make do, and often that amounts to mild protest, being overruled and then throwing their arms up. And I don’t even blame PMs - likewise, they’re just playing the hand they’ve been dealt. No PM or developer gets promoted for increasing reliability or speed, or reducing RAM or space on disk. Often, you get promoted for adding bloating buggy junk that no users actually use. How is that possible in this age of data driven decision making? Oh my friend if you only knew the ability of people to come up with fake and misguiding data to justify even the least used, most pointless features. I will end my cynical rant here.
- upon_drumhead 3y ago
  Least for email, you don’t have to use the bloatware. Mutt still exists and works just fine. If there are features you want in the bloated clients, that’s on you as the end user to make that choice. I do agree with your rant in principle and doubly so with chat clients.
- MattGaiser 3y ago
  > How is that possible in this age of data driven decision making? Probably because reducing RAM usage has even less potential than a feature nobody uses. Someone might use a feature, so you can take a risk on it. Who (who might otherwise buy Slack) wouldn't buy Slack because it uses 1-2 gigs of RAM?
  - bedobi 3y ago
    A lot of decisions are like that - individually, they’re the right one to make at the time, but they add up, and when there isn’t any serious framework for looking critically at their place in the whole, you end up with what we have, which is apps with a handful of core features people actually want and use, drowning in an avalanche of pointless bloated junk. And those apps in turn add up, even a latest gen m2 pro will struggle running Slack, Zoom, Excel, IntelliJ, Mail, Chrome etc etc which REALLY shouldn’t be the case. (AND proves that talk of “we don’t need to optimize, these days computers can easily run whatever” simply isn’t true - resources are like a vacuum, they expand junk until the junk fills the void, when the space could in fact have been better used by actually useful things)
MattGaiser 3y ago
Things like RAM, disk space, and bandwidth have become so abundant that it doesn't really matter to optimize for. Especially when their availability will have doubled within a couple of years for the high value customers. Slack is a resource optimization absurdity. But it serves its target users well as they have plenty of resources anyway.
- anon22981 3y ago
  In my organization (around 1k employees) Slack’s resource hogging is a very frequent complaint and many would rather use different software. (I don’t know what is better). Slowly but surely the pressure is building up to change the software.
tonymet 3y ago
Resource constraints are a good thing. With constrained resources, developers are more elegant and efficient with their apps. Bandwidth, storage, CPU, memory have all ben unconstrained for ~ 10 years now. Apps , Games and Websites are huge. ALGOs are sloppy. Nothing will happen until the bloat becomes visible again. This time it will take deliberate measurement of the problem and discipline to address it.
- b112 3y ago
  The DEV environments I crafted at work, all have constrained CPU, DB backend, and memory. After all, if you need gobs and gobs of CPU and RAM for a single user loading a web page, what on earth will PROD be like, with countless simultaneous page loads?? No, it doesn't slow down DEV work, coding takes place elsewhere. Shockingly(sarcasm), we've caught many resource issues, eg poor code, poor schema, lack of indexes or db optimization, before they hid prod and become disaster. AWS is hellish expensive, having a bill 10x what it could be is suboptimal. And the best way to prevent that, is resource constraints from day 1.
gumballindie 3y ago
Software is getting worse. Agile and product management lead the regression. There’s no time and little incentive to build quality when you can ship crap and ask for a payraise. The low quality stuff will be replaced by other low quality stuff and no one will notice. The only that should work is taking payments - erroring to charging users twice is acceptable.
esafak 3y ago
> But the market doesn’t care. Baloney. The market is a collection of people. I am a person and I care. The next time someone foists junk on you tell them it is junk. Show them a better way. For example, I had a displeasure of using Teams to communicate with some contractors recently. I had not used Teams in a while but knowing MS well I knew just what to expect, and I was not disappointed. Getting onboarded and authenticated was like pulling teeth, and when I joined a meeting with my speakers the participants complained that I was causing an echo. They did not know that that echo cancellation, as implemented by any tool for fit for the job, was not active. Nobody thought to ask "Huh, that's strange, we don't have this problem with Meet or Zoom." This is not something users should have to think about or configure in 2023. It comes down to recognizing junk, caring that it is junk, and having the option to choose something better.
- nradov 3y ago
  The people using Teams are doing so by IT department mandate. They don't have the option to choose something better, nor is it worth trying to fight the corporate political battles to change the vendor selection decision.
  - esafak 3y ago
    That's understood. I'm not going to insult the workers' intelligence by assuming they willingly chose it. But a company that doesn't let its workers pick their tools is probably a dysfunctional company that doesn't value productivity.
leoff 3y ago
Most people and companies write software to make money. If you are trying to optimize for this goal, does it really matter if your software is as effective as it's physically possible? There's a certain threshold for performance your customers implicitly expect you to reach. If you're within this boundary, is it really worth to spend days coming up with a new inverse square root optimization instead of bringing more value to your customer with new features?
- happytoexplain 3y ago
  It's a balance. But I would say it's important to not view performance as binary (acceptable or not acceptable), and also to not view features as inherently positive.
  - vinnymac 3y ago
    Couldn't agree with you more. I spent the last 6 months leading a web performance optimization effort of one very popular site. The dichotomy between upper management and ICs in the weeds doing the actual work is mind boggling at times. ICs would understand the spectrum, and desire to create baseline targets across the service for the best experience we could muster. Meanwhile management only cared whether the core funnel met a specific target and viewed all other efforts as a distractions of the bottom line. This narrow minded thinking directly results in a subpar experience for customers. It's a shame too, because product quality is critical at this organization.
- vorticalbox 3y ago
  100% I used to be rather obsessed (can't think of a better term) and making my code performant but as I've gotten on in years in my career I've moved more towards "just ship it and don't break anything"
  - benrutter 3y ago
    I 100% get this point of view, I don't really care about performance more than I need to to ensure stuff doesn't grind to a crawl but. . . I can't help but feel something has gone wrong in software where things are, by default, very slow. I've spent time optimizing code in the past (mostly python) and its not hard to speed things up a lot. It feels at times though that the ecosystem is working against you. Tools like electron encourage you to ship many many times more download size than is needed. Python loops speeds are getting better, but they've historically been insanely slow. I don't think we need to individually obsess over speed, but as an industry we need to give people the tools so that code is performing by default. I think we're moving away from that end.
massysett 3y ago
No. This is rose-colored glasses. Maybe the author doesn't remember the blue screen of death, or reflexively hitting ctrl-S every five minutes to save because the software might crash, or clicking on menus in Word and they wouldn't open because you had a macro virus. Maybe the author doesn't remember broken software that just was not fixed, ever, because there were no software updates. Maybe the author is just too young to remember those things. Well I remember them. Software simply does a lot more than it used to. A lot of people are complaining about chat clients. Today's chat client is a lot more complicated. Sure, go back and use IRC from thirty years ago. Do you remember all those commands? slash-something? And all that old, simple software is still there if you want it, better than ever. Go get Emacs, or vim, or mutt, or your old IRC client. Go download MP3s and put them in your folders and use a command-line program to play them back. Nobody has taken any of that software from anybody. And if I want to develop that simple software, it's easier than ever. A Common Lisp compiler used to cost big money, and even a C compiler came in a shrink-wrapped box, unless you had heard of GCC - which was hard because there wasn't much of an Internet. Now I can download that stuff for free. On my Mac I can get the same tools pros use, for free. Microsoft used to charge big bucks for comparable tools. Software is not getting worse.
- troupo 3y ago
  > Today's chat client is a lot more complicated. Sure, go back and use IRC from thirty years ago. Do you remember all those commands? slash-something? Not a lot. A tiny bit. They are still displaying text and a few images, and struggling to do even that (I wonder if Slack still needs 20% CPU to display an animated GIF). And yeah, slash commands are stil there. > Go download MP3s and put them in your folders and use a command-line program to play them back. Yes. We can play them back with Winamp which has all the bells and whistles that modern players have, for a fraction of resources. > Software is not getting worse. Current software struggle to do many of the same things that software of 20 years ago was already doing even though modern software has several magnitudes more resources.
  - metalcrow 3y ago
    I don't think it's a tiny bit at all! Compared to IRC, chat services nowadays have -server saved history -custom user uploaded emotes -threads and channels -native gif and video support -image embedding -voice and video streaming -complex automation apis -detailed and comprehensive moderation systems None of these are optional or superfluous. If you wanna go back to everyone having to run their own bouncer, approximately 5 people will join you. Tell them that they can't even have emojis and your probably down to 0.
ivanjermakov 3y ago
Software is fast enough for most users to not complain. And as long as users are happy business doesn't care about speed. The way to break a loop is to target audience with lower lag-tolerance. Once the user experiences fast product it'll be annoying to use everything else.
vkaku 3y ago
Yes. We are increasingly working with a model where we have resources for free, and the most valuable resource happens to be developer time. If our tooling and efficiency is getting better, why would we not be able to automate a wide variety of efficiency improvements as mere compiler tasks and get away with it? It's not. The life cycle prioritizes process over product and real-life constraints, thereby making software engineering a drive-by operation. Many of our software engineering methods today are discardable and thus unsustainable as well. We need to bring back the notion of developer attention and stop relying on mere tooling for improving our software. Our tooling is only as good as we are, and tools are also written by oblivious software developers, after all. We need to have ways where software developers look to perfect their art, understand the basics, dive bit-by-bit and get back to improving their applications. As opposed to simply complaining that their Electron based application is slow. They have to work with employers and teams who allow them to do that, at least once in their careers. That may get them to understand a lot of issues better and will lead to better outcomes for themselves and everyone around they write software for. There are many things a disciplined person could do, yet discipline is hard: picking a few places to do this sort of work is a great way to start this transformation.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  Is there any indication that any actual consumers of software care enough to justify the cost for increased quality? The market seems to reward features more so than reduced resource consumption, so it seems that that's what users want. I get that we as software developers want to use all the tools of our craft and build something beautiful and elegant, but it seems that few of anyone outside our craft care how the car looks under the hood. Sustainability and maintainability are a huge issue though that can kill products as development gets slower and slower. However, that at best orthogonal to things like resource consumption
  - vkaku 3y ago
    If you're spurning customers away, very few will come back and tell you they are leaving. This is often the reason why developers seldom get it and embrace that signal. More features do not necessarily translate to better outcomes. Features will often be measured at a point in time. It has to be good enough for people to use a product and not inconvenient enough for people to run away. More development does not mean more usage. Imagine someone in utilities connected your home to a power supply and then decided to periodically change it just because they need to show that they work - and not to be useful to you. Would you like that? That sort of active development thing is found seldom outside the subscription based SaaS business. Case in point: AWS, you have dozens of services launched every quarter and maybe its developers there get bored and launch new services, yet most people use those few key services a lot and are happy to stick around as long as things don't break terribly. The issue is that we've come to liken features and bloat with usage. Then we assume our customers want that bloat and can afford to do so. Mostly at that point, companies are optimizing for their own development over customers needs. Over a period of time we get disillusioned that our bloated software is often what our customers need. Then when that doesn't work well, try explosive methods such as platform obsolescence. Thus leading to loss of sustainability.
lapcat 3y ago
> While we take some time to rest up over the holidays and prepare for next year, we are re-publishing our top ten posts for the year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34581303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34581303 January 2023, 41 comments
mproud 3y ago
Systems and platforms are also getting more complicated.
steve1977 3y ago
> The last two decades have been dedicated to making software development faster, easier, and more foolproof. And admittedly, we’re creating apps faster than ever, with more features than ever, using less experienced developers than ever. The only part here that seems to be true in my experience is “using less experienced developers”. I don’t see that apps are developed faster nor that they have more features than ever. Quite the contrary.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  I'm not sure they get developed faster either. I just was talking to a friend about how quick it used to be to make a usable desktop app with Visual Basic or Delfi. Meanwhile I spent an insane amount of time to make a table in an iOS app that shows a table of kana and make it resize properly to the available screen size. This would have taken minutes in Delfi or VB and admittedly took me <30 minutes in the first draft of my app that used React.
TrianguloY 3y ago
One thing I don't see mentioned anywhere is security. Software in the past was highly insecure, today the amount of checks and countermeasures is very high. By itself each check add an almost unnoticeable amount, but it adds up. Not saying it isn't necessary though (even though sometimes it shouldn't, you don't have anything to secure if you don't have data at all, but ads, tracking, and similar needs it). This is similar to other elements, like households appliances. They now also seem less "reliable" than in the past, but take an old simple toaster, and it is probably a fire hazard.
nobodyandproud 3y ago
“Developers don’t realize the power they have”. The ones holding the purse strings have the power. That’s rarely developers.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  And even the ones holding the purse strings are under pressure to grow ARR and few to no users will pick the faster software, but the one that has the features they need and is good enough. We have games that run really well and are responsive, since that's where it matters. We can still do it, it just doesn't matter to anyone most of the time but developers who enjoy performance optimization (like I do!)
scotty79 3y ago
> The same general public who will pay $15 for a sandwich or a movie ticket—and then shrug and move on if they didn’t like it—are overcome by existential doubt if an app they’re interested in costs one (1) dollar. Software is like sex. Good requires effort. You have every right to demand money for it but not many people will appreciate it if you do. On the other hand if you use it skillfully you can use it to take oh so much of people's money.
kleiba 3y ago
This topic is one of Casey Muratori's (of Handmade Hero fame) pet peeves - here is a talk on it he recorded for youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YpFGkG-u1w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YpFGkG-u1w
smrtinsert 3y ago
It is one hundred percent the state of technology management. Feature delivery is everything, and reliability and performance are nothing - in fact, they might get you fired if you focus on them.
azanar 3y ago
The vibe I get from this article: If the customers of the software written today cared about quality -- and they _should_ care about quality -- they'd demand a higher standard of quality for the money they are paying. They don't, though. Firstly, the users aren't the customers. The customers are the advertisers or corporate buyers. Secondly, the users don't _want_ to be customers. They'd rather whatever they can get for free that anything that costs money, even if the thing that costs money could be orders of magnitude better. The first thought I have: I think quality is inclusive of size, speed, and reliability. Quality is _also_ features and functionality. It is also user experience. Probably many other things too, but this is just off the top of my head. I'm also not sure users would come rushing to the side of programmers if _they_ became the customers. I am the customer of companies that make many other things in my life. The quality probably isn't what it could be if that consideration was put much more front and center. For many things, I am _fine_ with that. For the same reasons, I don't think the users of software would be obviously wrong. Certainly I don't think they're obviously wrong enough for me to become preachy. If writing software that isn't to the level of quality I demand or need causes me existential dread, I am now willing to say that might be a "me" problem.
m3047 3y ago
Most software has always been really crappy, sometimes it's actually good in some sense and if you're a happy path user maybe you don't notice how crappy other aspects of it are. Used to be that hardware was comparatively crappy and more work went into that than into e.g. UI: not much point in worrying about color with monochrome displays. The question which is the lede maybe states it better than the title which precedes it: "With all the advancements in software development, apps could be much better. Why aren't they?" On that basis I think the article is ok although I didn't vote it up.
butz 3y ago
I would highly recommend for developers to take a bit of time to look into tinyapps.org and try to figure out what made those applications so great at the time and even now. Instead of hastily built Electron app, one should always consider alternatives, when software is build with much more thought from technical side, not only looks.
cratermoon 3y ago
> if people were willing to pay for apps This works to the advantage of a handful of large tech companies. Google, Facebook/Meta, Twitter/X, Apple, Microsoft, and some Chinese companies like Tencent, have the scale and market position to give away at least some of their respective applications. They provide what the article describes as a "joyless revenue machine that exploits your users’ attention and privacy at every turn", and do so with sufficient volume and market dominance to be profitable. In a world where almost anyone can whip up an app, the inability to charge for it, and difficulty of growing large enough to profit off user attention and data, acts as a barrier to entry.
hx8 3y ago
Quality features I enjoy paying for. * Buy once model. Trial + buy is best. Some YouTube videos of people using the software is often good enough. If you offer a free ad supported version, and a buy once to remove ads version I will almost always buy the no ads version. * Local saves. If you want to sync with the cloud that's fine, but I want to do read/writes from my local device whenever possible. * Local computation. I have fast chips, I don't mind using them. * Privacy. Do your competitors track me but you don't? Let me know. * Modifiable appearance. I really put value in being able to change fonts and colors. I think this is a bit niche.
gtsop 3y ago
1. Why treat software as special products of deteriorating quality? Other classes of products are also getting worse eg food 2. Start by blaming yourself, then blame others. Can you proove to your manager why spending a week on performance tuning is the best use of your time? If you can, they will let you do it. If you cannot, it is your fault or even maybe your mistake for thinking optimising your app's performance is a good idea. 3. A very good chunk of developers dont even know how to measure performance, let alone tune. 4. If technical debt is becoming a problem it is your responsibility to fix it as part of your next boud of code. Did your manager ask for feature X? Tell them it takes Y amount of time and bake in a slight refactor around X that will.make your software better. Dont even ask them, or let them know. Every feature will come with some slight tech debt resolution. 5. The economic issue of software is not a problem of what people percieve being worth paying for. The economic problem is software's inherent incompatibility with the capitalist market functionality. The history of software's monetization is the history of buisnesses desperately trying to hack around this core incompatibility - which we haven't fully realized yet.
nhatcher 3y ago
Reminds me of Niklaus Wirth's 1995 piece "A plea for lean software": About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage. (Modern program editors request 100 times that much) An operating system had to manage with 8,000 bytes, and compiler had to fit into 32 Kbytes, whereas their modern descendants require megabytes. Has all this inflated software become any faster? On the contrary. Were it not for a thousand times faster hardware, modern software would be utterly unusable.
- esafak 3y ago
  There must be a law that says software never gets faster. edit: Thank you for jogging my memory. I was serious.
  - nhatcher 3y ago
    I'm actually not sure how serious you are :) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
ifyoubuildit 3y ago
I don't know if it's worse overall, but it seems a lot more disrespectful. I think our devices spend a lot more compute time for the benefit of someone other than the user now. My one remaining windows machine seems like its always spun up doing something in the background, and I'm skeptical that it's for my benefit.
PlunderBunny 3y ago
I definitely feel that modern software is more frustrating, and thinking about it, my number one complaint is the use of mouse-over to trigger things. In late 80s/early 90s software, I could roam the mouse cursor over the screen and _nothing would change_. Now, moving the mouse is like navigating a minefield. Two examples: - I want to select a bit of text in Microsoft Teams (yeah, I know - it's not my choice), and as I move the cursor to the desired line, it moves over the line below, which causes a context menu to pop-up, which obscures the text I'm trying to select, so... swear, back off, and try again more carefully. - I switch applications on macOS with the command-tab keys, but I'm also anticipating where I want the mouse to be, so I start moving the mouse too. Sometimes, the mouse moves over the row of icons, which changes the selected icon, and I end up in a different app to the one I want.
mikewarot 3y ago
It completely depends on which platform you're writing for. Single Platform Native Code is Easier than ever: In the 1990s, you could write a CRUD program in a few hours in VB6, Access, or Delphi back in the 1990s. It would run on most computers worldwide, and was likely small enough to fit on a 1.4 Mb Floppy Disk, with help files, an installer, and everything. This is the software model that the Internet is optimized to deliver. Native code, direct from a programmer. It still works in many cases. GitHub has even made it easier than ever. However, this is not the model the "market" has been pushed into. -- The app store - a horrible compromise If you can stomach the restrictions, you can still write native code, subject to review and restrictions, to be deployed through an "App Store". I've never done this, but I do know that many things just don't align with their business model. So, if you're going down this route, you have to price your software, and meet the arbitrary restrictions of the walled garden it's going to serve. You will, at least, be able to run native code directly on the device, so that's nice. However, when the owners of the garden change their mind, your program may disappear, or you may be forced into changes that are otherwise unacceptable -- The web - a descent into madness If you're unfortunate enough to not be able to write native code, directly deployed, the environments in which software is expected to work have become abysmal. For you, it was unavoidable that things got orders of magnitude worse. Now, you're expected to put the interface of a program through the internet into a web browser that might be on a desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone, or even perhaps a smartwatch. There's no consistent interface. Thanks to a lack of secure general purpose computing, nobody is willing, nor should they be, to run code from somewhere else, unless it's from an "app store". -- I don't see things getting better for another decade or so. Eventually a consistent set of GUI widgets and interfaces will be found, and a consensus will be reached about how things should act on a Desktop vs Tablet vs Watch, etc. The shift to open source software was a great advance, but the shift to installing/downloading dependencies from the internet at install time was a horrible choice. There needs to be a way to lock all dependencies, "security" be damned. You should be able to run programs written a decade ago without having to rewrite it to adapt to all the breaking changes that seem to be so quick to happen in Open source. Security is part of the OS, and any application libraries shouldn't be able to make the situation worse. Only capability based Operating Systems can resolve that dilemma.
rstuart4133 3y ago
My answer to whether "software is getting worse" is it depends on the age of the software. I can't think of a single body of software that's been under continuous development over the last few decades that hasn't got markedly more stable. The Windows kernel, the Linux kernel, Android, iPhone, gcc, web browsers, web servers, Office software, and even RAID off the top of my head are all vastly better than they were. (I've lost more data to early hardware RAID and IBM SAN's than to failing HDD's). But that old software is swamped by new software - web pages in particular, but also IoT, Tesla self driving, smart TV's, Max 737's, my robot vacuum and my step daughters desk (it refuses to go up unless you reset it). As predicted software is indeed eating the world, so new software is everywhere. A day doesn't go by without me having to work around the deficiencies of some piece of crap. So you could be forgiven for thinking that software is getting worse if all you are doing is comparing mature software to new stuff. But remember a long time ago (well not that long, as I was a programmer back then too), that mature software was just a new and unreliable as todays new software. With very rare exceptions like the space shuttle software (because it requires a metric f*k ton of money to get bugs per loc in new software down to 5 or 6 nines), all new software is shit.
nipperkinfeet 3y ago
Software these days is far worse. Using bloated web technology, not optimized, and the terrible trend of smartphone user interfaces on desktop operating systems. I keep archives of all the old software since everything is being replaced with a subscription-only, dreadful web application. There aren't any new features that I find appealing anyways.

65 points by kungfudoi 3y ago

khedoros1 3y ago

> DOOM, which came out in 1996 1993.

svaha1728 3y ago

Fair number of apps out there running on a skeleton crew after a successful acquisition.

jrm4 3y ago

It really is the "how do you pay for it" question, always, no? How do you incentivize quality? We've seen two approaches that definitely don't work super well to deliver consistent quality. One is "proprietary, make people buy per unit" and the other is "free and open source." (And note: I say the latter as a huge FLOSS fan. I'll still push it all day -- but only because I think freedom is more fundamental than quality in this regard; preserve freedom first, then we can think about quality control.)

drewcoo 3y ago
If we're talking about "how do you pay for it," then there are not just two models. Closed source products can be sold outright, rented, subsidized via ads, some combination of those, and more. They can even be given away as tax write-offs or loss leaders or somesuch. All of those models also exist for open source products! It turns out that customers aren't paying for source access so much as they're paying for working software. No one can agree about what "quality" actually is. Mostly, it's a word used as a weapon whenever someone wants to bully change into happening. Or not happening, for that matter. But a weapon either way.
- jrm4 3y ago
  Of course, I didn't mean to suggest that there were only two at all, just that "here are two that DON'T work for this." Good point on "quality," it makes a lot of sense to try to look at the thing we're talking about here without talking about "quality" or "software." There are problems and opportunities in this technological space; what good ways are there to handle those, noting that much of the work that needs to get done for them isn't likely to occur without payment? Something like that.
082349872349872 3y ago
Also: quality for whom? What Eloi consider quality and what Morlocks consider quality are, if not opposed, at least in strong competition due to opportunity cost. (if it's not obvious, I spend my efforts on quality for Morlocks, and am willing to leave the much-more-time-intensive quality for Eloi up to "the market")
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  One metric could be 'number of hard crashes per thousand end-user usage hours'.

troupo 3y ago

Yes, yes it is. The main problem is that we are okay with shipping unfinished barely-beta software because we can always force the upgrade/update/change. You didn't have that luxury when you were shipping software on a floppy disk/CD-ROM, and that was it: all the bugs and issues were there, forever.

javajosh 3y ago

It is a tremendous amount of work to tread on a new path. Although at times exciting, it's often just scary and you have a huge downside risk and only a minor upside benefit. Breaking with even one widely held assumption creates a huge burden and if you break with more than one, which I think is necessary, is exponentially harder. And there is no single project which benefits from this extra overhead. The impetus has to come from within and it's very personal like an artist feeling a need to express themselves no matter the cost.

bedobi 3y ago

Yeah it’s getting worse. As a commenter points out, we now have fucking chat and email clients that take up literal gigabytes of ram and who knows how much on disk, and despite orders of magnitude more computing power are slower than ever, which is idiotic. And self serving as it may be, I don’t believe it’s because of unskilled, lazy or noncommitted devs. Most devs do the best they can within the constraints imposed on them. When a PM comes with the latest idiotic pet feature that isn’t as much for actual users as to pad their resume and enable them to climb the next step on their career ladder, devs have to make do, and often that amounts to mild protest, being overruled and then throwing their arms up. And I don’t even blame PMs - likewise, they’re just playing the hand they’ve been dealt. No PM or developer gets promoted for increasing reliability or speed, or reducing RAM or space on disk. Often, you get promoted for adding bloating buggy junk that no users actually use. How is that possible in this age of data driven decision making? Oh my friend if you only knew the ability of people to come up with fake and misguiding data to justify even the least used, most pointless features. I will end my cynical rant here.

upon_drumhead 3y ago
Least for email, you don’t have to use the bloatware. Mutt still exists and works just fine. If there are features you want in the bloated clients, that’s on you as the end user to make that choice. I do agree with your rant in principle and doubly so with chat clients.
MattGaiser 3y ago
> How is that possible in this age of data driven decision making? Probably because reducing RAM usage has even less potential than a feature nobody uses. Someone might use a feature, so you can take a risk on it. Who (who might otherwise buy Slack) wouldn't buy Slack because it uses 1-2 gigs of RAM?
- bedobi 3y ago
  A lot of decisions are like that - individually, they’re the right one to make at the time, but they add up, and when there isn’t any serious framework for looking critically at their place in the whole, you end up with what we have, which is apps with a handful of core features people actually want and use, drowning in an avalanche of pointless bloated junk. And those apps in turn add up, even a latest gen m2 pro will struggle running Slack, Zoom, Excel, IntelliJ, Mail, Chrome etc etc which REALLY shouldn’t be the case. (AND proves that talk of “we don’t need to optimize, these days computers can easily run whatever” simply isn’t true - resources are like a vacuum, they expand junk until the junk fills the void, when the space could in fact have been better used by actually useful things)

MattGaiser 3y ago

Things like RAM, disk space, and bandwidth have become so abundant that it doesn't really matter to optimize for. Especially when their availability will have doubled within a couple of years for the high value customers. Slack is a resource optimization absurdity. But it serves its target users well as they have plenty of resources anyway.

anon22981 3y ago
In my organization (around 1k employees) Slack’s resource hogging is a very frequent complaint and many would rather use different software. (I don’t know what is better). Slowly but surely the pressure is building up to change the software.

tonymet 3y ago

Resource constraints are a good thing. With constrained resources, developers are more elegant and efficient with their apps. Bandwidth, storage, CPU, memory have all ben unconstrained for ~ 10 years now. Apps , Games and Websites are huge. ALGOs are sloppy. Nothing will happen until the bloat becomes visible again. This time it will take deliberate measurement of the problem and discipline to address it.

b112 3y ago
The DEV environments I crafted at work, all have constrained CPU, DB backend, and memory. After all, if you need gobs and gobs of CPU and RAM for a single user loading a web page, what on earth will PROD be like, with countless simultaneous page loads?? No, it doesn't slow down DEV work, coding takes place elsewhere. Shockingly(sarcasm), we've caught many resource issues, eg poor code, poor schema, lack of indexes or db optimization, before they hid prod and become disaster. AWS is hellish expensive, having a bill 10x what it could be is suboptimal. And the best way to prevent that, is resource constraints from day 1.

gumballindie 3y ago

Software is getting worse. Agile and product management lead the regression. There’s no time and little incentive to build quality when you can ship crap and ask for a payraise. The low quality stuff will be replaced by other low quality stuff and no one will notice. The only that should work is taking payments - erroring to charging users twice is acceptable.

esafak 3y ago

> But the market doesn’t care. Baloney. The market is a collection of people. I am a person and I care. The next time someone foists junk on you tell them it is junk. Show them a better way. For example, I had a displeasure of using Teams to communicate with some contractors recently. I had not used Teams in a while but knowing MS well I knew just what to expect, and I was not disappointed. Getting onboarded and authenticated was like pulling teeth, and when I joined a meeting with my speakers the participants complained that I was causing an echo. They did not know that that echo cancellation, as implemented by any tool for fit for the job, was not active. Nobody thought to ask "Huh, that's strange, we don't have this problem with Meet or Zoom." This is not something users should have to think about or configure in 2023. It comes down to recognizing junk, caring that it is junk, and having the option to choose something better.

nradov 3y ago
The people using Teams are doing so by IT department mandate. They don't have the option to choose something better, nor is it worth trying to fight the corporate political battles to change the vendor selection decision.
- esafak 3y ago
  That's understood. I'm not going to insult the workers' intelligence by assuming they willingly chose it. But a company that doesn't let its workers pick their tools is probably a dysfunctional company that doesn't value productivity.

leoff 3y ago

Most people and companies write software to make money. If you are trying to optimize for this goal, does it really matter if your software is as effective as it's physically possible? There's a certain threshold for performance your customers implicitly expect you to reach. If you're within this boundary, is it really worth to spend days coming up with a new inverse square root optimization instead of bringing more value to your customer with new features?

happytoexplain 3y ago
It's a balance. But I would say it's important to not view performance as binary (acceptable or not acceptable), and also to not view features as inherently positive.
- vinnymac 3y ago
  Couldn't agree with you more. I spent the last 6 months leading a web performance optimization effort of one very popular site. The dichotomy between upper management and ICs in the weeds doing the actual work is mind boggling at times. ICs would understand the spectrum, and desire to create baseline targets across the service for the best experience we could muster. Meanwhile management only cared whether the core funnel met a specific target and viewed all other efforts as a distractions of the bottom line. This narrow minded thinking directly results in a subpar experience for customers. It's a shame too, because product quality is critical at this organization.
vorticalbox 3y ago
100% I used to be rather obsessed (can't think of a better term) and making my code performant but as I've gotten on in years in my career I've moved more towards "just ship it and don't break anything"
- benrutter 3y ago
  I 100% get this point of view, I don't really care about performance more than I need to to ensure stuff doesn't grind to a crawl but. . . I can't help but feel something has gone wrong in software where things are, by default, very slow. I've spent time optimizing code in the past (mostly python) and its not hard to speed things up a lot. It feels at times though that the ecosystem is working against you. Tools like electron encourage you to ship many many times more download size than is needed. Python loops speeds are getting better, but they've historically been insanely slow. I don't think we need to individually obsess over speed, but as an industry we need to give people the tools so that code is performing by default. I think we're moving away from that end.

massysett 3y ago

No. This is rose-colored glasses. Maybe the author doesn't remember the blue screen of death, or reflexively hitting ctrl-S every five minutes to save because the software might crash, or clicking on menus in Word and they wouldn't open because you had a macro virus. Maybe the author doesn't remember broken software that just was not fixed, ever, because there were no software updates. Maybe the author is just too young to remember those things. Well I remember them. Software simply does a lot more than it used to. A lot of people are complaining about chat clients. Today's chat client is a lot more complicated. Sure, go back and use IRC from thirty years ago. Do you remember all those commands? slash-something? And all that old, simple software is still there if you want it, better than ever. Go get Emacs, or vim, or mutt, or your old IRC client. Go download MP3s and put them in your folders and use a command-line program to play them back. Nobody has taken any of that software from anybody. And if I want to develop that simple software, it's easier than ever. A Common Lisp compiler used to cost big money, and even a C compiler came in a shrink-wrapped box, unless you had heard of GCC - which was hard because there wasn't much of an Internet. Now I can download that stuff for free. On my Mac I can get the same tools pros use, for free. Microsoft used to charge big bucks for comparable tools. Software is not getting worse.

troupo 3y ago
> Today's chat client is a lot more complicated. Sure, go back and use IRC from thirty years ago. Do you remember all those commands? slash-something? Not a lot. A tiny bit. They are still displaying text and a few images, and struggling to do even that (I wonder if Slack still needs 20% CPU to display an animated GIF). And yeah, slash commands are stil there. > Go download MP3s and put them in your folders and use a command-line program to play them back. Yes. We can play them back with Winamp which has all the bells and whistles that modern players have, for a fraction of resources. > Software is not getting worse. Current software struggle to do many of the same things that software of 20 years ago was already doing even though modern software has several magnitudes more resources.
- metalcrow 3y ago
  I don't think it's a tiny bit at all! Compared to IRC, chat services nowadays have -server saved history -custom user uploaded emotes -threads and channels -native gif and video support -image embedding -voice and video streaming -complex automation apis -detailed and comprehensive moderation systems None of these are optional or superfluous. If you wanna go back to everyone having to run their own bouncer, approximately 5 people will join you. Tell them that they can't even have emojis and your probably down to 0.

ivanjermakov 3y ago

Software is fast enough for most users to not complain. And as long as users are happy business doesn't care about speed. The way to break a loop is to target audience with lower lag-tolerance. Once the user experiences fast product it'll be annoying to use everything else.

vkaku 3y ago

Yes. We are increasingly working with a model where we have resources for free, and the most valuable resource happens to be developer time. If our tooling and efficiency is getting better, why would we not be able to automate a wide variety of efficiency improvements as mere compiler tasks and get away with it? It's not. The life cycle prioritizes process over product and real-life constraints, thereby making software engineering a drive-by operation. Many of our software engineering methods today are discardable and thus unsustainable as well. We need to bring back the notion of developer attention and stop relying on mere tooling for improving our software. Our tooling is only as good as we are, and tools are also written by oblivious software developers, after all. We need to have ways where software developers look to perfect their art, understand the basics, dive bit-by-bit and get back to improving their applications. As opposed to simply complaining that their Electron based application is slow. They have to work with employers and teams who allow them to do that, at least once in their careers. That may get them to understand a lot of issues better and will lead to better outcomes for themselves and everyone around they write software for. There are many things a disciplined person could do, yet discipline is hard: picking a few places to do this sort of work is a great way to start this transformation.

ajmurmann 3y ago
Is there any indication that any actual consumers of software care enough to justify the cost for increased quality? The market seems to reward features more so than reduced resource consumption, so it seems that that's what users want. I get that we as software developers want to use all the tools of our craft and build something beautiful and elegant, but it seems that few of anyone outside our craft care how the car looks under the hood. Sustainability and maintainability are a huge issue though that can kill products as development gets slower and slower. However, that at best orthogonal to things like resource consumption
- vkaku 3y ago
  If you're spurning customers away, very few will come back and tell you they are leaving. This is often the reason why developers seldom get it and embrace that signal. More features do not necessarily translate to better outcomes. Features will often be measured at a point in time. It has to be good enough for people to use a product and not inconvenient enough for people to run away. More development does not mean more usage. Imagine someone in utilities connected your home to a power supply and then decided to periodically change it just because they need to show that they work - and not to be useful to you. Would you like that? That sort of active development thing is found seldom outside the subscription based SaaS business. Case in point: AWS, you have dozens of services launched every quarter and maybe its developers there get bored and launch new services, yet most people use those few key services a lot and are happy to stick around as long as things don't break terribly. The issue is that we've come to liken features and bloat with usage. Then we assume our customers want that bloat and can afford to do so. Mostly at that point, companies are optimizing for their own development over customers needs. Over a period of time we get disillusioned that our bloated software is often what our customers need. Then when that doesn't work well, try explosive methods such as platform obsolescence. Thus leading to loss of sustainability.

lapcat 3y ago

> While we take some time to rest up over the holidays and prepare for next year, we are re-publishing our top ten posts for the year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34581303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34581303 January 2023, 41 comments

mproud 3y ago

Systems and platforms are also getting more complicated.

steve1977 3y ago

> The last two decades have been dedicated to making software development faster, easier, and more foolproof. And admittedly, we’re creating apps faster than ever, with more features than ever, using less experienced developers than ever. The only part here that seems to be true in my experience is “using less experienced developers”. I don’t see that apps are developed faster nor that they have more features than ever. Quite the contrary.

ajmurmann 3y ago
I'm not sure they get developed faster either. I just was talking to a friend about how quick it used to be to make a usable desktop app with Visual Basic or Delfi. Meanwhile I spent an insane amount of time to make a table in an iOS app that shows a table of kana and make it resize properly to the available screen size. This would have taken minutes in Delfi or VB and admittedly took me <30 minutes in the first draft of my app that used React.

TrianguloY 3y ago

One thing I don't see mentioned anywhere is security. Software in the past was highly insecure, today the amount of checks and countermeasures is very high. By itself each check add an almost unnoticeable amount, but it adds up. Not saying it isn't necessary though (even though sometimes it shouldn't, you don't have anything to secure if you don't have data at all, but ads, tracking, and similar needs it). This is similar to other elements, like households appliances. They now also seem less "reliable" than in the past, but take an old simple toaster, and it is probably a fire hazard.

nobodyandproud 3y ago

“Developers don’t realize the power they have”. The ones holding the purse strings have the power. That’s rarely developers.

ajmurmann 3y ago
And even the ones holding the purse strings are under pressure to grow ARR and few to no users will pick the faster software, but the one that has the features they need and is good enough. We have games that run really well and are responsive, since that's where it matters. We can still do it, it just doesn't matter to anyone most of the time but developers who enjoy performance optimization (like I do!)

scotty79 3y ago

> The same general public who will pay $15 for a sandwich or a movie ticket—and then shrug and move on if they didn’t like it—are overcome by existential doubt if an app they’re interested in costs one (1) dollar. Software is like sex. Good requires effort. You have every right to demand money for it but not many people will appreciate it if you do. On the other hand if you use it skillfully you can use it to take oh so much of people's money.

kleiba 3y ago

This topic is one of Casey Muratori's (of Handmade Hero fame) pet peeves - here is a talk on it he recorded for youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YpFGkG-u1w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YpFGkG-u1w

smrtinsert 3y ago

It is one hundred percent the state of technology management. Feature delivery is everything, and reliability and performance are nothing - in fact, they might get you fired if you focus on them.

azanar 3y ago

The vibe I get from this article: If the customers of the software written today cared about quality -- and they _should_ care about quality -- they'd demand a higher standard of quality for the money they are paying. They don't, though. Firstly, the users aren't the customers. The customers are the advertisers or corporate buyers. Secondly, the users don't _want_ to be customers. They'd rather whatever they can get for free that anything that costs money, even if the thing that costs money could be orders of magnitude better. The first thought I have: I think quality is inclusive of size, speed, and reliability. Quality is _also_ features and functionality. It is also user experience. Probably many other things too, but this is just off the top of my head. I'm also not sure users would come rushing to the side of programmers if _they_ became the customers. I am the customer of companies that make many other things in my life. The quality probably isn't what it could be if that consideration was put much more front and center. For many things, I am _fine_ with that. For the same reasons, I don't think the users of software would be obviously wrong. Certainly I don't think they're obviously wrong enough for me to become preachy. If writing software that isn't to the level of quality I demand or need causes me existential dread, I am now willing to say that might be a "me" problem.

m3047 3y ago

Most software has always been really crappy, sometimes it's actually good in some sense and if you're a happy path user maybe you don't notice how crappy other aspects of it are. Used to be that hardware was comparatively crappy and more work went into that than into e.g. UI: not much point in worrying about color with monochrome displays. The question which is the lede maybe states it better than the title which precedes it: "With all the advancements in software development, apps could be much better. Why aren't they?" On that basis I think the article is ok although I didn't vote it up.

butz 3y ago

I would highly recommend for developers to take a bit of time to look into tinyapps.org and try to figure out what made those applications so great at the time and even now. Instead of hastily built Electron app, one should always consider alternatives, when software is build with much more thought from technical side, not only looks.

cratermoon 3y ago

> if people were willing to pay for apps This works to the advantage of a handful of large tech companies. Google, Facebook/Meta, Twitter/X, Apple, Microsoft, and some Chinese companies like Tencent, have the scale and market position to give away at least some of their respective applications. They provide what the article describes as a "joyless revenue machine that exploits your users’ attention and privacy at every turn", and do so with sufficient volume and market dominance to be profitable. In a world where almost anyone can whip up an app, the inability to charge for it, and difficulty of growing large enough to profit off user attention and data, acts as a barrier to entry.

hx8 3y ago

Quality features I enjoy paying for. * Buy once model. Trial + buy is best. Some YouTube videos of people using the software is often good enough. If you offer a free ad supported version, and a buy once to remove ads version I will almost always buy the no ads version. * Local saves. If you want to sync with the cloud that's fine, but I want to do read/writes from my local device whenever possible. * Local computation. I have fast chips, I don't mind using them. * Privacy. Do your competitors track me but you don't? Let me know. * Modifiable appearance. I really put value in being able to change fonts and colors. I think this is a bit niche.

gtsop 3y ago

1. Why treat software as special products of deteriorating quality? Other classes of products are also getting worse eg food 2. Start by blaming yourself, then blame others. Can you proove to your manager why spending a week on performance tuning is the best use of your time? If you can, they will let you do it. If you cannot, it is your fault or even maybe your mistake for thinking optimising your app's performance is a good idea. 3. A very good chunk of developers dont even know how to measure performance, let alone tune. 4. If technical debt is becoming a problem it is your responsibility to fix it as part of your next boud of code. Did your manager ask for feature X? Tell them it takes Y amount of time and bake in a slight refactor around X that will.make your software better. Dont even ask them, or let them know. Every feature will come with some slight tech debt resolution. 5. The economic issue of software is not a problem of what people percieve being worth paying for. The economic problem is software's inherent incompatibility with the capitalist market functionality. The history of software's monetization is the history of buisnesses desperately trying to hack around this core incompatibility - which we haven't fully realized yet.

nhatcher 3y ago

Reminds me of Niklaus Wirth's 1995 piece "A plea for lean software": About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage. (Modern program editors request 100 times that much) An operating system had to manage with 8,000 bytes, and compiler had to fit into 32 Kbytes, whereas their modern descendants require megabytes. Has all this inflated software become any faster? On the contrary. Were it not for a thousand times faster hardware, modern software would be utterly unusable.

esafak 3y ago
There must be a law that says software never gets faster. edit: Thank you for jogging my memory. I was serious.
- nhatcher 3y ago
  I'm actually not sure how serious you are :) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

ifyoubuildit 3y ago

I don't know if it's worse overall, but it seems a lot more disrespectful. I think our devices spend a lot more compute time for the benefit of someone other than the user now. My one remaining windows machine seems like its always spun up doing something in the background, and I'm skeptical that it's for my benefit.

PlunderBunny 3y ago

I definitely feel that modern software is more frustrating, and thinking about it, my number one complaint is the use of mouse-over to trigger things. In late 80s/early 90s software, I could roam the mouse cursor over the screen and _nothing would change_. Now, moving the mouse is like navigating a minefield. Two examples: - I want to select a bit of text in Microsoft Teams (yeah, I know - it's not my choice), and as I move the cursor to the desired line, it moves over the line below, which causes a context menu to pop-up, which obscures the text I'm trying to select, so... swear, back off, and try again more carefully. - I switch applications on macOS with the command-tab keys, but I'm also anticipating where I want the mouse to be, so I start moving the mouse too. Sometimes, the mouse moves over the row of icons, which changes the selected icon, and I end up in a different app to the one I want.

mikewarot 3y ago

It completely depends on which platform you're writing for. Single Platform Native Code is Easier than ever: In the 1990s, you could write a CRUD program in a few hours in VB6, Access, or Delphi back in the 1990s. It would run on most computers worldwide, and was likely small enough to fit on a 1.4 Mb Floppy Disk, with help files, an installer, and everything. This is the software model that the Internet is optimized to deliver. Native code, direct from a programmer. It still works in many cases. GitHub has even made it easier than ever. However, this is not the model the "market" has been pushed into. -- The app store - a horrible compromise If you can stomach the restrictions, you can still write native code, subject to review and restrictions, to be deployed through an "App Store". I've never done this, but I do know that many things just don't align with their business model. So, if you're going down this route, you have to price your software, and meet the arbitrary restrictions of the walled garden it's going to serve. You will, at least, be able to run native code directly on the device, so that's nice. However, when the owners of the garden change their mind, your program may disappear, or you may be forced into changes that are otherwise unacceptable -- The web - a descent into madness If you're unfortunate enough to not be able to write native code, directly deployed, the environments in which software is expected to work have become abysmal. For you, it was unavoidable that things got orders of magnitude worse. Now, you're expected to put the interface of a program through the internet into a web browser that might be on a desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone, or even perhaps a smartwatch. There's no consistent interface. Thanks to a lack of secure general purpose computing, nobody is willing, nor should they be, to run code from somewhere else, unless it's from an "app store". -- I don't see things getting better for another decade or so. Eventually a consistent set of GUI widgets and interfaces will be found, and a consensus will be reached about how things should act on a Desktop vs Tablet vs Watch, etc. The shift to open source software was a great advance, but the shift to installing/downloading dependencies from the internet at install time was a horrible choice. There needs to be a way to lock all dependencies, "security" be damned. You should be able to run programs written a decade ago without having to rewrite it to adapt to all the breaking changes that seem to be so quick to happen in Open source. Security is part of the OS, and any application libraries shouldn't be able to make the situation worse. Only capability based Operating Systems can resolve that dilemma.

rstuart4133 3y ago

My answer to whether "software is getting worse" is it depends on the age of the software. I can't think of a single body of software that's been under continuous development over the last few decades that hasn't got markedly more stable. The Windows kernel, the Linux kernel, Android, iPhone, gcc, web browsers, web servers, Office software, and even RAID off the top of my head are all vastly better than they were. (I've lost more data to early hardware RAID and IBM SAN's than to failing HDD's). But that old software is swamped by new software - web pages in particular, but also IoT, Tesla self driving, smart TV's, Max 737's, my robot vacuum and my step daughters desk (it refuses to go up unless you reset it). As predicted software is indeed eating the world, so new software is everywhere. A day doesn't go by without me having to work around the deficiencies of some piece of crap. So you could be forgiven for thinking that software is getting worse if all you are doing is comparing mature software to new stuff. But remember a long time ago (well not that long, as I was a programmer back then too), that mature software was just a new and unreliable as todays new software. With very rare exceptions like the space shuttle software (because it requires a metric f*k ton of money to get bugs per loc in new software down to 5 or 6 nines), all new software is shit.

nipperkinfeet 3y ago

Software these days is far worse. Using bloated web technology, not optimized, and the terrible trend of smartphone user interfaces on desktop operating systems. I keep archives of all the old software since everything is being replaced with a subscription-only, dreadful web application. There aren't any new features that I find appealing anyways.