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Comment by henrik_w | Hacker News Reader

Software that becomes "bloated" is software that is successful and in use. Typically, the users want more and more functionality, because they use the system for more and more. This is not bad.

Software that is not used (for what ever reason) is abandoned, and therefore does not grow.

So there is selection bias too - the most notable software is the successful cases, and they become "bloated" because they are successful.

(what the author talks about is not bloat, it's clever hacks that also make it much harder to understand the program)

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"Bloated" is a just a pejorative term that means nothing more interesting than "Contains feature(s) that I don't personally use."

.. which means it is slower than it needs to be and has a more cluttered interface than it needs to have for that user.

If those problems don't interest you, then it's hard to imagine what your idea of good software is.

Does it really though? Those are trivial problems to solve: dont show users tools they dont use via roles/permissions; dont execute code that is unrelated to the current purpose.

Roles/permission code is unrelated to the current purpose.

Really though, it's more of a systemic issue. There're so many ways you can make decisions to make your software make decisions to conveniently pretend you're giving the user exactly what they want without having asked them what they want. Maybe they don't want to download and install code they don't plan or know how to run. Bloat is problem for users because it has machine costs, which users have to pay for in time, money, and attention.

That's the compromise users have to make when using anything that's mass produced. If users want software individually tailored to them, then it's gonna cost them a fortune. This way, they get things for cheap because all the customers are paying for the same thing.

Similarly, "legacy code" is a pejorative that means "Code that I didn't write and don't understand yet because I haven't had a chance to look at it for long enough, which I would really like to rewrite simply because reading other people's code is harder than writing your own and it would be easier for me to do that than to understand the existing code and the context in which it was written".

True to a certain extent, but to come back to an example given by the author; Apple Preview vs Acrobat Reader: both are successful pieces of software used by millions, one is a lot less bloated than the other though. Some companies/projects seem a lot better at avoiding bloat than others, for a multitude of reasons (culture, business model, ...).

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