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Comment by sjfjsjdjwvwvc | Hacker News Reader

Good software doesn’t need constant updates or maintenance.

Personally I hate the culture of incremental updates, shipping halfbroken beta versions, bolting on security as last measure because who gives a fuck about dataleaks. Everyone trying to build an everything app and sucking up all the data they can get their hands on.

The sad thing is nowadays most software „engineers“ or product „managers“ can’t even imagine an alternative to this.

Write a program that does one thing well and you don’t need to constantly update it.

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> Good software doesn’t need constant updates or maintenance

It does though. Unless your software just play a perfect 440hz A. Even a simple homemade tuner (my first and only android app) can't run on new phones without having to be updated (sadly. I use an ad-riddled one now :/)

The word you missed in GPs post is "constant".

I don't think this qualifier is useful here. My very simple app needed 'constant' updates to avoid falling behind and needing a huge rework after 8 years.

Constant here meant regular. Following android Api updates is constant work. It can also mean that the intensity of work needed is the same, but I don't think it's the idea there (if it is, I disagree with the idea too, for different reason).

I think his idea was that good software exists in a nutshell and does not need upgrade. Which is true for embedded, like the arduino that manage the doors of my father's chicken coop (ideally. The photoresistor disagree here when I think about it, but the software is bad so that kinda prove GGP's point). Not as true for software with complex human interfaces though.

GNU grep is 100k lines of code (including header files and tests). That's probably just as complex as any random Android application. Yet I don't expect it to need a huge rework after 8 years. In fact, if it changed interface in any meaningful way, it would immediately be forked by impatient users who have jobs to do. I cannot wait until the mobile ecosystem is anywhere near that useful.

I work on some software in a regulated space. We have to make changes monthly as regulations change.

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