4 ms·

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

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.
  - ok123456 3y ago
    I don't want any of those, and they annoy me when I'm forced to interact with them.
  - loloquwowndueo 3y ago
    Oh irc can handle emojis :)
  - troupo 3y ago
    Even your phone is a magnitude or two faster than the computers running IRC. Do you really truly think that all you listed is or somehow should be difficult on modern hardware? Or that the truly abysmal performance that modern chat apps exhibit can somehow be justified because they embed things many of which are either handled by hardware (images and video) or by the server (states, history, automation)?
  - azlev 3y ago
    Slack is an expensive software. I expect performance and yet, I can't find messages, I have a hard time to use slack and run IDEs at the same time, they change the interface and I lost 2-3 days until adapt. If I could save some bucks removing videos, emojis, voice and video streaming, I would not hesitate in do so. You got a fair point on how things work: it's all about communication. You want to stay where everybody is, so the incentive is to capture market, not make a fast software. I think that most of the innovation effort in the last decade was on how to delivery fast.
- 3y ago
donatj 3y ago
> 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? So you completely forget AIM/ICQ/MSN existed? They did basically everything modern clients do in a couple megabytes of RAM. Jabber even more so.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  User Experience matters. In the AIM/ICQ/MSN days, the userbase was much more niche as it was not user friendly. Simple changes like responsiveness or aesthetics help less adept users adopt and use technology. Furthermore, technology is now global. You will need to support more fonts and languages. You will need to test for various different localizations. You will also have to add support and localizations for the less physically able.
  - donatj 3y ago
    That seems like a baseless critique. In what way were they any of these less user friendly than what we have today? I suspect you haven't actually used them? I think if anything their interactions were more clearly designed. Have you tried the likes of Snapchat where you have to just paw at the screen until you learn what your pawing does? OS level text rendering was basically solved by this time in the early 2000s. I definitely spoke to people in Japanese on ICQ in 2000/2001
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      > OS level text rendering was basically solved by this time in the early 2000s Not for all languages. For starters, my ancestral language's Unicode support didn't arrive until 2008. In that same Unicode proposal, support for a language spoken by 22 million people was added as well. Additional blocks line for languages like Laotian, colloquial Khmer, etc weren't added til the 2000s. Also, plenty of languages (eg. Burmese) don't use Unicode fonts and instead use localized non-standardized blocks such as Zawgyi. The internet in the 1990s was designed with the North America, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore in mind. The majority of the world wasn't on the internet yet and hadn't even used a computer. The form factor, usability, and documentation needed simply didn't exist in the 1990s and early 2000s yet. The Internet didn't truly "democratize" until low cost smartphones like Samsung, Oppo, and Xiaomi began entering the market in the early 2010s. > Have you tried the likes of Snapchat where you have to just paw at the screen until you learn what your pawing does Yes. I was the target age demographic for Snapchat. For people who's primary experience with computers is smartphones (aka the majority of the world) an app like Snapchat or WhatsApp or WeChat or TikTok is easier to use than folders in Windows, MacOS, or Linux, let alone terminal or IRC
celdon25 3y ago
There are multiple dimensions of software quality, and by some metrics (such as performance efficiency) things are notably getting worse. Some would also argue that fewer features (such as those IRC chat commands) takes power away from the power users, a sentiment I have held. Though I agree that at an overall level, the quality has improved. The incentives to write software may have shifted over time as well. I seem to recall a lot of good quality, older software being written as a passion project. While those still exist and are being written today, the stuff that gets shown to you in a google search (usually) isn't that. Takes away the incentive to build anything that isn't backed by an investor looking for quick returns.
ok123456 3y ago
> 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. This is more of a problem with Microsoft Windows products before they universally adopted the NT kernel across their product line. The instability of the 16-bit kernel and its 32-bit extensions was a constant point of ridicule from users of other architectures and operating systems at the time.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  Okay, the wheel of death :/ https://xkcd.com/961/ https://xkcd.com/961/ EDIT: unless you prefer one of those unix things in which case good luck even getting graphics
  - ok123456 3y ago
    You can write buggy application software on any platform. But if the operating and system architecture provides sufficient separation and protection, it won't crash other processes or the entire operating system, as was the case for consumers getting their first Windows PCs in the 90s and having to be paranoid about random crashes after hitting the wrong button.
mise_en_place 3y ago
> And if I want to develop that simple software, it's easier than ever. I had a hearty chuckle at this bit. It’s completely out of touch. Modern software development is far from simple. It also requires an Internet connection for getting packages.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  Are you pining for installable CDs?
  - petermcneeley 3y ago
    The author IS pining for the economics of installable CDs yes.
    - smegsicle 3y ago
      common thought: it sure is convenient being able to download this from the internet uncommon thought: downloading this from the internet sure is more convenient than already having it
- wredcoll 3y ago
  Ah, yes, software sucks because <spins wheel> the internet exists. You know, you don't need the internet to develop software, you can still do it exactly like we used to in the 80s. Download gcc and start reading man pages.
  - tzs 3y ago
    I think it is more distribution than development that is the big difference between now and pre-internet times as far as things that affect software quality go. When I worked at places making software that would be sold to users on floppy or CD in stores like Best Buy and CompUSA back when very few of those users had internet connections these things were true: 1. If a user needed help beyond what was provided by the printed manual that came with the software and whatever help system we built into the software itself they would call our toll-free support number. The typical cost of such a support incident was more than our profit on selling the software to that user. 2. To distribute bug fixes to existing users we'd have to mail them floppies or CDs. 3. The only future revenue we would get from existing users would be from them buying more of our products. These factors made management place a heavy emphasis on not shipping software until it was good enough that very few people would need support, that whatever bugs we missed were not severe enough or numerous enough that we'd have to ship updates, and that users would be happy enough with it that when they saw other products from us they'd want to buy them. You released your product when it was done, and then you moved on to work on your next product. When internet became the main means of both support and distribution much of that changed. Support became a lot cheaper for the developers for a couple reasons. First, users could turn to community forums that would often solve their problems without the company even getting involved. Second, if they did contact the company it would be via email or a web form rather than an expensive toll-free phone call. Distributing updates to users became routine, and even automated. Accordingly the number and severity of bugs that can be in the first release has gotten higher. It just has to be good enough to not piss the user off too much before you can release an update. The net (no put intended!) result is that nowadays people release at a stage when they have features and bug levels that in the floppy/CD retail days would have been considered beta or often even late alpha. So it is not really that software sucks nowadays compared to back then. It is that back then users didn't even see the software until it was finished. Nowadays they get the software while it is still being actively developed.
foobiekr 3y ago
Software is absolutely getting worse. I think you need to go back in time and really consider whether the SW is "doing a lot more." The valid excuses for some of the footprint these days are bad protocols (but you pretty much have to use them - JSON is an abomination for resource use), Unicode, and higher resolution assets. There is actually very little else that's driving it other than horrible coding. One way you can tell is that performance SW hasn't really bloated the way desktop and mobile software has. Postgres? Still pretty tiny and scales as you'd expect. Compilers? Even Excel isn't a huge pig the way the electron apps are. Slack is so bad it is actually hard to think of a software application that is worse, and barely does anything more than most other, lighter-weight applications of the same sort.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  > Slack is so bad it is actually hard to think of a software application that is worse, and barely does anything more than most other, lighter-weight applications of the same sort. MS Teams comes to mind. It's more bloated and it lacks some of the features of Slack, or implements them in a user-hostile way locked into other MS products.
- gilbetron 3y ago
  Huh? While I'm sure there are isolated examples of software getting worse, nearly all software is better than it was even, say, 5 years ago. Slack is great, with an incredible number of features and functionality. I was back "in time" and I'm much happier with software these days on all levels.
AlexandrB 3y ago
> 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? True enough. Modern software does a lot of extra stuff that the user neither asked for, nor wants. This is a double hit to software quality. Not only is there the added complexity of all that crap in the code base, but the intentional "crapification" when everything is working as intended. A recent example: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/assassins-creed-in-game-ads-a-technical-error-says-ubisoft-lets-hope-so https://www.tomsguide.com/news/assassins-creed-in-game-ads-a...
city41 3y ago
> Software simply does a lot more than it used to To me, this is the main problem. Most software now has so many features that the owning company can't possibly keep eyes on it all anymore, or just chooses not to as a cost cutting measure. Simple example that has hit me lately: simplified view in Chrome on Android does not work anymore. It just shows a loading spinner forever. I would bet money Google has no idea or just doesn't care (surely they collection exception metrics?). I hit stuff like this all the time now. I just fully expect say 10-20% of features in a modern app to just flat out not work.
- fomine3 3y ago
  "simplified view" means there's no ads. There's a good incentive for Google to not fix it.
petermcneeley 3y ago
"I was there Gandalf. I was there three thousand years ago ..." I was there too and I think your glasses are a bit foggy. I can give you one example. Windows had a bug where some timer rolled over every 42 days causing some minor issues with applications. Today windows reboots your machine every month! I think about this often. You should too.
- esafak 3y ago
  No thanks, I've got better things to do. Get something else; Mac works for me.
II2II 3y ago
> 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. That was my first thought too. My second thought was that was 30 years ago. Different people may be using a different era as a reference. When it comes to software reliability, the industry appears to go through a push every once in a while. In the mid-1990's there was a push to introduce memory protection into personal computer operating systems. Software became more reliable because it was protected from other software, and because it became more difficult for software to trash the operating system's memory. In the early 2000's security was a much greater issue, so we saw another push that affected software quality. Well, several pushes. So yes, there has been a definite improvement in software reliability in some respects. Yet software reliability is also about the people sitting behind the keyboard and writing the code. Better operating systems and better development tools may help to catch some of their errors, but it won't catch all of their errors. If they try to (recursively) calculate the Fibonacci Sequence with `f(n-1) + f(n-1)`, the computer will gladly do it and gladly produce the wrong result. Of course development tools aren't infallible either, and what they catch depends not only upon which tools you use but how you use them. For example: C won't detect integer overflow. Rust appears to be somewhat better. It will detect overflows in debug builds, though it will only not detect overflows by default in release builds. It also offers functions to handle overflows in various way. But as soon as you depend upon a developer changing a default or making an explicit function all, you are bumping into the same issue as the Fibonacci Sequence example: the computer is going to gladly do what the developer told it to, even if it is not correct. Even though software reliability is tremendously better than it was 30 years ago because of technical improvements in the operating system and development tools, I suspect it also ebbs and flows on shorter time scales simply because there are entire classes of errors that are affected by the people who develop (or fund the development of) software. (Edit: in a twist of irony, HN was not responding when I initially tried to post this. Another point is that the reliability of a lot of modern software depends upon external services.)
goalieca 3y ago
There was also fantastically complete and fully featured software that was stable and all bugs were roughly documented and known by users. Today you get a lot of unfinished software with the attitude that we can patch it if it matters. This is exemplified by video games.
lossolo 3y ago
> 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. I remember all of this, and it was a lot of time ago. XP was more stable than Vista. Then, Windows 7 arrived and became the most stable Windows version ever. Windows 10 and 11 turned out to be overbloated and problematic. I remember using uTorrent, which, after Azureus, felt like a breath of fresh air. It was written in C, super fast, small, and efficient. Now, it too has become an overbloated mess. In the last 10 years, the huge demand for software has led to many people entering the field without adequate understanding and knowledge about software enegineering, resulting in a market flooded with buggy, overbloated software.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
Complicated is worse, not better. IMHO as end user. Hardware has gotten better. Much, much better. But I still like to use old software. Because I find it's the only way I can appreciate the new hardware. New software is far too unilaterally manipulative and exploitive of both the user and the user's hardware resources, often for ridiculous, unnecessary purposes such as data collection, surveillance and advertising services.

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.
- ok123456 3y ago
  I don't want any of those, and they annoy me when I'm forced to interact with them.
- loloquwowndueo 3y ago
  Oh irc can handle emojis :)
- troupo 3y ago
  Even your phone is a magnitude or two faster than the computers running IRC. Do you really truly think that all you listed is or somehow should be difficult on modern hardware? Or that the truly abysmal performance that modern chat apps exhibit can somehow be justified because they embed things many of which are either handled by hardware (images and video) or by the server (states, history, automation)?
- azlev 3y ago
  Slack is an expensive software. I expect performance and yet, I can't find messages, I have a hard time to use slack and run IDEs at the same time, they change the interface and I lost 2-3 days until adapt. If I could save some bucks removing videos, emojis, voice and video streaming, I would not hesitate in do so. You got a fair point on how things work: it's all about communication. You want to stay where everybody is, so the incentive is to capture market, not make a fast software. I think that most of the innovation effort in the last decade was on how to delivery fast.
3y ago

donatj 3y ago

> 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? So you completely forget AIM/ICQ/MSN existed? They did basically everything modern clients do in a couple megabytes of RAM. Jabber even more so.

alephnerd 3y ago
User Experience matters. In the AIM/ICQ/MSN days, the userbase was much more niche as it was not user friendly. Simple changes like responsiveness or aesthetics help less adept users adopt and use technology. Furthermore, technology is now global. You will need to support more fonts and languages. You will need to test for various different localizations. You will also have to add support and localizations for the less physically able.
- donatj 3y ago
  That seems like a baseless critique. In what way were they any of these less user friendly than what we have today? I suspect you haven't actually used them? I think if anything their interactions were more clearly designed. Have you tried the likes of Snapchat where you have to just paw at the screen until you learn what your pawing does? OS level text rendering was basically solved by this time in the early 2000s. I definitely spoke to people in Japanese on ICQ in 2000/2001
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    > OS level text rendering was basically solved by this time in the early 2000s Not for all languages. For starters, my ancestral language's Unicode support didn't arrive until 2008. In that same Unicode proposal, support for a language spoken by 22 million people was added as well. Additional blocks line for languages like Laotian, colloquial Khmer, etc weren't added til the 2000s. Also, plenty of languages (eg. Burmese) don't use Unicode fonts and instead use localized non-standardized blocks such as Zawgyi. The internet in the 1990s was designed with the North America, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore in mind. The majority of the world wasn't on the internet yet and hadn't even used a computer. The form factor, usability, and documentation needed simply didn't exist in the 1990s and early 2000s yet. The Internet didn't truly "democratize" until low cost smartphones like Samsung, Oppo, and Xiaomi began entering the market in the early 2010s. > Have you tried the likes of Snapchat where you have to just paw at the screen until you learn what your pawing does Yes. I was the target age demographic for Snapchat. For people who's primary experience with computers is smartphones (aka the majority of the world) an app like Snapchat or WhatsApp or WeChat or TikTok is easier to use than folders in Windows, MacOS, or Linux, let alone terminal or IRC

celdon25 3y ago

There are multiple dimensions of software quality, and by some metrics (such as performance efficiency) things are notably getting worse. Some would also argue that fewer features (such as those IRC chat commands) takes power away from the power users, a sentiment I have held. Though I agree that at an overall level, the quality has improved. The incentives to write software may have shifted over time as well. I seem to recall a lot of good quality, older software being written as a passion project. While those still exist and are being written today, the stuff that gets shown to you in a google search (usually) isn't that. Takes away the incentive to build anything that isn't backed by an investor looking for quick returns.

ok123456 3y ago

> 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. This is more of a problem with Microsoft Windows products before they universally adopted the NT kernel across their product line. The instability of the 16-bit kernel and its 32-bit extensions was a constant point of ridicule from users of other architectures and operating systems at the time.

paulddraper 3y ago
Okay, the wheel of death :/ https://xkcd.com/961/ https://xkcd.com/961/ EDIT: unless you prefer one of those unix things in which case good luck even getting graphics
- ok123456 3y ago
  You can write buggy application software on any platform. But if the operating and system architecture provides sufficient separation and protection, it won't crash other processes or the entire operating system, as was the case for consumers getting their first Windows PCs in the 90s and having to be paranoid about random crashes after hitting the wrong button.

mise_en_place 3y ago

> And if I want to develop that simple software, it's easier than ever. I had a hearty chuckle at this bit. It’s completely out of touch. Modern software development is far from simple. It also requires an Internet connection for getting packages.

paulddraper 3y ago
Are you pining for installable CDs?
- petermcneeley 3y ago
  The author IS pining for the economics of installable CDs yes.
  - smegsicle 3y ago
    common thought: it sure is convenient being able to download this from the internet uncommon thought: downloading this from the internet sure is more convenient than already having it
wredcoll 3y ago
Ah, yes, software sucks because <spins wheel> the internet exists. You know, you don't need the internet to develop software, you can still do it exactly like we used to in the 80s. Download gcc and start reading man pages.
- tzs 3y ago
  I think it is more distribution than development that is the big difference between now and pre-internet times as far as things that affect software quality go. When I worked at places making software that would be sold to users on floppy or CD in stores like Best Buy and CompUSA back when very few of those users had internet connections these things were true: 1. If a user needed help beyond what was provided by the printed manual that came with the software and whatever help system we built into the software itself they would call our toll-free support number. The typical cost of such a support incident was more than our profit on selling the software to that user. 2. To distribute bug fixes to existing users we'd have to mail them floppies or CDs. 3. The only future revenue we would get from existing users would be from them buying more of our products. These factors made management place a heavy emphasis on not shipping software until it was good enough that very few people would need support, that whatever bugs we missed were not severe enough or numerous enough that we'd have to ship updates, and that users would be happy enough with it that when they saw other products from us they'd want to buy them. You released your product when it was done, and then you moved on to work on your next product. When internet became the main means of both support and distribution much of that changed. Support became a lot cheaper for the developers for a couple reasons. First, users could turn to community forums that would often solve their problems without the company even getting involved. Second, if they did contact the company it would be via email or a web form rather than an expensive toll-free phone call. Distributing updates to users became routine, and even automated. Accordingly the number and severity of bugs that can be in the first release has gotten higher. It just has to be good enough to not piss the user off too much before you can release an update. The net (no put intended!) result is that nowadays people release at a stage when they have features and bug levels that in the floppy/CD retail days would have been considered beta or often even late alpha. So it is not really that software sucks nowadays compared to back then. It is that back then users didn't even see the software until it was finished. Nowadays they get the software while it is still being actively developed.

foobiekr 3y ago

Software is absolutely getting worse. I think you need to go back in time and really consider whether the SW is "doing a lot more." The valid excuses for some of the footprint these days are bad protocols (but you pretty much have to use them - JSON is an abomination for resource use), Unicode, and higher resolution assets. There is actually very little else that's driving it other than horrible coding. One way you can tell is that performance SW hasn't really bloated the way desktop and mobile software has. Postgres? Still pretty tiny and scales as you'd expect. Compilers? Even Excel isn't a huge pig the way the electron apps are. Slack is so bad it is actually hard to think of a software application that is worse, and barely does anything more than most other, lighter-weight applications of the same sort.

cratermoon 3y ago
> Slack is so bad it is actually hard to think of a software application that is worse, and barely does anything more than most other, lighter-weight applications of the same sort. MS Teams comes to mind. It's more bloated and it lacks some of the features of Slack, or implements them in a user-hostile way locked into other MS products.
gilbetron 3y ago
Huh? While I'm sure there are isolated examples of software getting worse, nearly all software is better than it was even, say, 5 years ago. Slack is great, with an incredible number of features and functionality. I was back "in time" and I'm much happier with software these days on all levels.

AlexandrB 3y ago

> 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? True enough. Modern software does a lot of extra stuff that the user neither asked for, nor wants. This is a double hit to software quality. Not only is there the added complexity of all that crap in the code base, but the intentional "crapification" when everything is working as intended. A recent example: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/assassins-creed-in-game-ads-a-technical-error-says-ubisoft-lets-hope-so https://www.tomsguide.com/news/assassins-creed-in-game-ads-a...

city41 3y ago

> Software simply does a lot more than it used to To me, this is the main problem. Most software now has so many features that the owning company can't possibly keep eyes on it all anymore, or just chooses not to as a cost cutting measure. Simple example that has hit me lately: simplified view in Chrome on Android does not work anymore. It just shows a loading spinner forever. I would bet money Google has no idea or just doesn't care (surely they collection exception metrics?). I hit stuff like this all the time now. I just fully expect say 10-20% of features in a modern app to just flat out not work.

fomine3 3y ago
"simplified view" means there's no ads. There's a good incentive for Google to not fix it.

petermcneeley 3y ago

"I was there Gandalf. I was there three thousand years ago ..." I was there too and I think your glasses are a bit foggy. I can give you one example. Windows had a bug where some timer rolled over every 42 days causing some minor issues with applications. Today windows reboots your machine every month! I think about this often. You should too.

esafak 3y ago
No thanks, I've got better things to do. Get something else; Mac works for me.

II2II 3y ago

> 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. That was my first thought too. My second thought was that was 30 years ago. Different people may be using a different era as a reference. When it comes to software reliability, the industry appears to go through a push every once in a while. In the mid-1990's there was a push to introduce memory protection into personal computer operating systems. Software became more reliable because it was protected from other software, and because it became more difficult for software to trash the operating system's memory. In the early 2000's security was a much greater issue, so we saw another push that affected software quality. Well, several pushes. So yes, there has been a definite improvement in software reliability in some respects. Yet software reliability is also about the people sitting behind the keyboard and writing the code. Better operating systems and better development tools may help to catch some of their errors, but it won't catch all of their errors. If they try to (recursively) calculate the Fibonacci Sequence with `f(n-1) + f(n-1)`, the computer will gladly do it and gladly produce the wrong result. Of course development tools aren't infallible either, and what they catch depends not only upon which tools you use but how you use them. For example: C won't detect integer overflow. Rust appears to be somewhat better. It will detect overflows in debug builds, though it will only not detect overflows by default in release builds. It also offers functions to handle overflows in various way. But as soon as you depend upon a developer changing a default or making an explicit function all, you are bumping into the same issue as the Fibonacci Sequence example: the computer is going to gladly do what the developer told it to, even if it is not correct. Even though software reliability is tremendously better than it was 30 years ago because of technical improvements in the operating system and development tools, I suspect it also ebbs and flows on shorter time scales simply because there are entire classes of errors that are affected by the people who develop (or fund the development of) software. (Edit: in a twist of irony, HN was not responding when I initially tried to post this. Another point is that the reliability of a lot of modern software depends upon external services.)

goalieca 3y ago

There was also fantastically complete and fully featured software that was stable and all bugs were roughly documented and known by users. Today you get a lot of unfinished software with the attitude that we can patch it if it matters. This is exemplified by video games.

lossolo 3y ago

> 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. I remember all of this, and it was a lot of time ago. XP was more stable than Vista. Then, Windows 7 arrived and became the most stable Windows version ever. Windows 10 and 11 turned out to be overbloated and problematic. I remember using uTorrent, which, after Azureus, felt like a breath of fresh air. It was written in C, super fast, small, and efficient. Now, it too has become an overbloated mess. In the last 10 years, the huge demand for software has led to many people entering the field without adequate understanding and knowledge about software enegineering, resulting in a market flooded with buggy, overbloated software.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

Complicated is worse, not better. IMHO as end user. Hardware has gotten better. Much, much better. But I still like to use old software. Because I find it's the only way I can appreciate the new hardware. New software is far too unilaterally manipulative and exploitive of both the user and the user's hardware resources, often for ridiculous, unnecessary purposes such as data collection, surveillance and advertising services.