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Comment by SulfurHexaFluri | Hacker News Reader

Some interesting thoughts in here. I guess the main thing is that there is basically infinite demand for more things in software. You can take almost any feature from any product and come up with new things you would like it to do that would take entire teams of developers to work on.

Software will never get quicker to develop because we will always request the absolute maximum amount of features that the market can stand to afford.

Basically every area has exploded with more features and is still way way behind what people would ideally want. Just look at the difference between Discord and IRC.

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But do we actually have more features? I don't think Google Docs has more features than Ami Pro.

I think the problem is the modern focus on adding features, without consideration whether and how these compose. Not all features are equal - some can be used as a foundation on which more can be easily built, while some are a detriment to that. Just adding features without architectural consideration leads to - surprisingly - bad architecture.

Did Ami Pro let dozens of users around the world edit the same document at the same time? Some of them being on cell phones?

Did it automatically store your document somewhere that can be accessed from any computer with internet access?

Seems to me like we really do have more features.

Did Ami Pro even have fonts?

I think a problem here might be that those aren't exactly "Ami Pro" (or word processor in general) features, they're just tacked on the word processor even though it has nothing to do with word processing (even the multiple editors at the same time is essentially about having multiple views - not too different than opening two MDI windows in Office 97 or whatever with the same document but different positions - that happen to have input/output from across the network).

Some of that can be done in an agnostic way by pairing Ami Pro with something like Dropbox. But ultimately for better use (and having applications focus on the stuff they're supposed to be about) the underlying system should allow for such uses - after all one of the original ideas behind Windows was to avoid having every application reinvent its own UI. But we just seem to be stuck around that point in most OSes (Cocoa probably being the exception of an OS framework that provides more than the basics)... if anything we're regressing with every application (on the desktop at least) ignoring the OS GUI and doing its own anyway.

Simultaneous editing of the same document over the Internet is a fundamentally different problem than having multiple views on a local machine: 1) On a local machine, only one view has the input focus, and 2) you don't have to deal with high-latency, unreliable communication and synchronization.

> the underlying system should allow for such uses

That's not possible in the general case. It's a hard enough problem for the specialized case of text editing.

I do not see as a different problem really, what you are describing is having a separate cursor per view (which is something programs already do).

Also i'm talking about an ideal hypothetical system here, not something that exists - but it is certainly possible to do something like that, you are way too quick to dismiss something as not possible.

Sounds like a No True Scotsman argument for what counts as word processing features.

I know plenty of scenarios where collaborative document editing is a killer feature as part of writing a document.

I didn't argue that it wouldn't be a good (or "killer") feature, i argued that it could be a feature that is provided at a different level that lets the word processor focus on word processing (ie. what word processors are and should be about) while simultaneous/collaborative data editing is also provided for other applications (e.g. collaborative spreadsheet editing, or image editing, list editing or whatever else would make sense).

> Just adding features without architectural consideration leads to - surprisingly - bad architecture.

But you don't sell architecture. You sell features.

And people write their own Google Docs features. I have spent a bunch of time coding up things for that.

I mean.... isn't this true for hardware too?

Razors today looks very different from the ones when it was invented. Same goes for vacuum cleaners, cars, tools for construction/manual task, the list goes on.

The only notable difference is that each iteration of hardware have a vividly clear version start/end date compared to the rolling versioning of software. First vacuum cleaner was invented 1908...

Everything is improving I guess but there is very little relative investment in razors. They look different but arguably function worse than the original style double edge.

Vacuum cleaners have had a bit of innovation but no one is really desperate for a better vacuum cleaner unlike software. Also many of these hardware items have basically reached close to their peak form. You can't really make a radically better bicycle because we have already reached almost the best design.

With a team and a few years you can usually obliterate the leading software product in most areas and with a large team you could completely revolutionize it since there is so much easy target improvements to be had.

I guess the main thing is that there is basically infinite demand for more things in software.

Law is very similar to software in this way. They both also take a long time to write & are never actually "finished."

This is an interesting analogy. However, I would argue that Law is less constrained by the laws of nature.

If a program is broken, even the best programmer in the world may not be able to fix it if they can't diagnose the underlying problem. Whereas in law; there is no such problem. If a law is found to be bad, you change it. Most reasonably competent lawyers could come up with a solution. Not to say that creativity and intelligence isn't required, the constraints are just different. (You do hit the laws of nature at some point, but I believe there are guardrails in law that prevent this from happening; e.g. no judge will sentence a person to run a million miles even if some combination of inane laws may require that as punishment).

Law loopholes can be hard to diagnose and fix.

Law is constrained by human nature.

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