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Comment by hsn915 | Hacker News Reader

Everything should not need support. The fact that most everything needs support is a symptom of how crazy the software industry is.

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I keep hearing people say that, but how do you propose we write software that has no bugs and does everything perfectly right the first time? That seems impossible.

The first time? Sure, nothing ever gets it right the first time, but over time software should converge on being bug free and not requiring any support at all. Free-with-paid-support has a perverse incentive against this.

"over time software should converge on being bug free"

Yeah, and the way that's done is by refactoring things, removing buggy/deprecated things, and not adding any more new features/requirements... So, pick your poison, I guess? I'd love to go move on to the next job as much as the next person, but somebody still has to be paid to do those things. I don't see what the significant difference is there with free-with-paid-support, if you pay for it up front you're still paying the same cost.

All I hear is excuses. I'm not interestd in hearing excuses.

That seems dismissive and I don't know why you would be hearing that. If there is a way to do this that you think would not qualify as an excuse, then you should mention it, otherwise both of us are stuck to what we are limited to by these bodies that require rest and sustenance.

You're creating a false dichotomy: we can either add new features, or stabilize the current version, but we can't do both!

Yes you can. You can spend some time to stabilize, and then add new features on top, then stabilize again if needed.

I am not saying that's a dichotomy, I mean this purely as a function of resources. Sure you can do both but that takes up twice as much time as if you only did one of them. So however much you want to do of either is really up to the project's management goals and what the customer is willing to pay for...

What other projects besides (La)TeX and METAFONT have noticeably converged on bug-free over time? Perhaps the Linux & BSD kernels.

LaTeX specifically might be bug free, but it's so incomprehensible to a not very experienced user (like me) that it exactly matches the notion of "software where you need support". the only good thing is that you can often get the support for free on the internet. Even though it might be stable and bug free, I'm just avoiding it for "shinier" things like HTML and Ctrl+P in a browser...

Is it incomprehensible because it can be configured in different ways, or is just because the notation language it uses is not familiar to you?

The distinction is cruicial.

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