I hate almost all software (2011) | Hacker News Reader

I hate almost all software (2011)

tinyclouds.org

25 pointstosh8 comments

I get that the point of this rant is that its only user experience that matters, and I agree with that, but I take issue with the idea of burning things to the ground and starting again.

Thats not how these things work. Grand re-writes rarely work out in massively complicated systems. We make incremental improvements as we move towards the ever shifting goalposts. I think its naive to look at a massively successful system and think I can rewrite that, make it better and do it in a weekend. Which is a sentiment I hear all the time. If its that easy then just do it!

Thats not to say things should't be made better, and that user experience isn't important, it is. But to realistically accomplish those goals working within the system, and understanding the complexity is necessary.

I agree that thinking you can redo a whole OS or a browser from scratch in a weekend is naive (at best), but it's also true that usually you can better understand a problem after you have some experience seeing how the current implementation of its solution works.

That is to say, sometimes a rewrite from scratch is sorely needed. I, for one, would love to see a new operating system rising from the ashes of Unix to make it better without the historical baggage and some of the idiosyncrasies. And I'm not necessarily taking about plan 9.

The problem I have noticed with rewrites is that the people designated as the "architects" feel they need to design everything in such a way that it can handle every possible new feature request. They completely don't understand YAGNI.

So, I have seen several rewrites at several companies completely fail and take millions of dollars with them.

Haha well said! I think about this every freaking day. ZFS is about the only pice of software I use I don't literally want to grab the author(s) by the throat and choke them, asking, "Seriously?? you think this tire fire is easy to understand, configure and debug??!!111oneoneone" ok I get its mostly written by engineers, but it's used by normal people. Your configuration syntax makes very little sense, your debug messages are not very clear, and documentation on average sucks, exceptions being BSD documentation and their man pages.

When I see something like this, I usually end up thinking about how nice it would be to have only one layer of code between the machine and humans, such as a programming language that can also be the operating system (lisp, forth, erlang, etc)

Try using an operating system from a company that has money to spend on adding complexity!

Writing bug-free code is considered one of the holy grails of computer science.

Developers are users too.

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