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Comment by Jayschwa | Hacker News Reader

Heh, I somewhat felt this way yesterday. Two co-workers and I (all programmers) spent half an hour trying to get a video chat to work. By the end, I think we all felt a little embarrassed by our profession. (To be fair, Zoom works pretty well most days. Yesterday just had gremlins I guess.)

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I decided the other day [the abstract recent past other day, not yesterday like you] that what I really want is about ten years.

What I really want is for my computing devices not to change for about ten years at a time. I don't want to have to upgrade the hardware, I want it to be repairable with replacement parts available, I don't want to have to upgrade the OS to a new major version that moves all of my widgets around for about ten years. I don't want to use beta software that slowly mutates until it mostly works or is abruptly discontinued, I want to install a suite of finished software that continues to work the same way with only imperceptible security fixes for ten years, so that I don't constantly have to be adjusting my workflow as individual portions are obliviated.

And then, when that ten years is up and I need to upgrade, I want the changes to be actual upgrades stemming from fixing design mistakes and removing pain points and doing things that not only weren't possible ten years ago, but which are also desirable and not merely novel.

If we model it after cars, then there's a large population of people like you (us). But there's also a large group who trades their car in every year or two for the 'new model'. And they revel in the widgets moving around and the color scheme changing.

So maybe we need a Studebaker for computers.

The wish behind your wish is perfect engineers - the only way to achieve what you're describing is to have engineers and designers so good that they converge on a perfect, bug-free system on the first try. What we have in real life is developers of sometimes high but always finite intelligence and sometimes high but limited foresight.

Well, he could get his wish by buying a few copies of his computer, for spare parts, installing what he wants and then unplugging from the internet. Interestingly, this is precisely what JPL does before launching their missions: they have original, exact hardware and software on hand to trouble-shoot if they need it.

The wish isn't for perfect engineers -- the wish is for the perfect not to be the enemy of the good. I just want to be able to use a "good enough" product with the knowledge that it will stick around rather than be dropped in favor of iterating the design, maybe forwards, maybe backwards, maybe sideways, but always moving, spinning, chasing the perfect version of itself.

I want stability, not perfection.

"Ten years" reminds me of the Decenarian maths in "Anathem." There are other little concepts in that novel that point to the value in taking one's time, such as the "chalk, ink, stone" mediums, and which ideas are worth expressing in each. I'm also reminded of the slow food movement. Perhaps we need a "slow software" movement?

This is largely achievable, http://songseed.org/post/20201113.aa.simple.launch.menu.html

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