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Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

This is a behind-the-scenes sort of improvement which has been happening since the late 2010s while real applications have seemingly gotten worse.

What’s actually happening is that there are a lot of bloated, buggy, badly-designed programs today because they simply wouldn’t have existed prior to the improvements in developer tooling. In some cases because the software has a much broader scope made possible by the tooling (distributed “webscale” sites with massive data throughput and configurability). Alternatively (or additionally), sometimes the developer(s) are mistakenly using a tool (e.g. Kubernetes) that is way too webscale/generalized for their purpose and/or itself wouldn’t have existed prior to improvements in development tooling.

Good software still exists today. It’s just gold lying around in a forest of junk, whereas it used to be more like less-shiny gold lying around in a barren plain.

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The web was better when there was a barrier to entry. You must be at least this smart to host a website turned into "post on social media platform xxxx".

Development was better when you must be at least this skilled to build software.

I read a post yesterday where someone was so proud of their bad permissions system... Well someone was unaware of how linux permissions and groups work and what a group even is was (and how it might be represented in a directory to be managed).

As for "web scale" well, all of that autoscaling is just auto-spending. "Cattle not pets" would be a great metaphor but cattle are valuable, most people are leased on chicken farming and own nothing. (If that analogy is lost on you, do your home work and be appalled, but it is on point).

Remember kids, its called a container for a reason, its how we isolate your shitty application from bringing down the rest of the system or the hardware that you dont understand!

> its called a container for a reason, its how we isolate your shitty application from bringing down the rest of the system or the hardware that you dont understand

This reads as extremely cynical and also uncharitable towards the benefits containers provide around managing different versions of dependencies or run-times for the people who do understand the hardware.

It's really nice to not have to wrangle multiple versions of Python or set up venvs or whatever else on a target server that may be hosting separate apps. The alternative of having a couple of self-contained containers with nginx in front of it is better in many ways.

> while real applications have seemingly gotten worse

Can you elaborate on this? I'm not sure I agree.

Modern day applications are doing far, far more than they were 10-15 years ago. Much more traffic, much more data, much more tracking (unfortunately), etc.

Performance of software has gotten significantly worse pretty much everywhere. Older computers can't run the things we run today, which is obvious. "Handing more traffic and data" is purely due to the amount of hardware used.

I would also argue that quality has gone down significantly (unless you talk about enterprise apps, where quality was always abysmal) and the cost of making software has also increased, even if we adjust for developer salary. But those are just personal opinions.

Which is what I like in Apple’s ecosystem. There are still good software there. Things 3, Bear, Paper, Anybox, iA Writer, Reeder, Doppler, Meta (tag editor), Nova, Transmit, Secrets,…

Teams is a gigabyte and takes literal minutes to open. Facetime was 14 years ago and did not take literal minutes to open.

(I hate to be the sort of person who exaggerates, so I decided to go through the effort of actually timing Teams for this comment so that I could give it a fair number. I return bearing no such measurement, as today it decided to instantly segfault on open.

    Exception Type:        EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
    Exception Codes:       KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0000000000000008
    Exception Codes:       0x0000000000000001, 0x0000000000000008

    Termination Reason:    Namespace SIGNAL, Code 11 Segmentation fault: 11
    Terminating Process:   exc handler [40516]
)

That's more a commentary on the inefficiency of Teams rather than software in general. Slack and discord both open pretty much instantaneously, and rarely show up in the top 10 resource consumers on my laptop.

I guess there's 'software' and there's software. The problem is in the larger human system that makes it mandatory for me to run Teams on my laptop- there's a reason I complained about Teams and not my college friend's raytracer project, even though both programs have similar resource consumption and segfault issues.

> Modern day applications are doing far, far more than they were 10-15 years ago. Much more traffic, much more data, much more tracking (unfortunately), etc.

Yes but are you sure the 'more' is in the user's interest?

I'd say 90% isn't. Out of which maybe half is less development cost because you can throw layers upon layers of bloat upon the user, and half is spyware.

No but the company isn't trying to develop software that's best for the user. They're trying to develop software that's best for their bottom line.

This isn’t what he meant, but my optimistic reading is that the average quality of software has gone down because so many more people can make it. People who would have gotten close but given up now can publish. It does mean a pile of rubble to sift in the marketplace, but so has any advance in creative tools, and many people are scratching their own itches with software and not bothering others with it, which has no downsides.

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