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I think the only way this gets better is with software development tools that make it impossible to create invalid states.

In the physical world, when we build something complex like a car engine, a microprocessor, or bookcase, the laws of physics guide us and help prevent invalid states. Not all of them -- an upside down bookcase still works -- but a lot of them.

Of course, part of the problem is that when we build the software equivalent of an upside down bookcase, we 'patch' it by creating trim and shims to make it look better and more structurally sound instead of tossing it and making another one the right way.

But mostly, we write software in a way that allows for a ton of incorrect states. As a trivial example, expressing a person's age as an 'int', allowing for negative numbers. As a more complicated example, allowing for setting a coupon's redemption date when it has not yet been clipped.

To determine what states should be possible is the act of writing software.

John Backus's Turing Award lecture meditated on this idea, and concluded that the best way to do this at scale is to simply minimize the creation of states in the first place, and be careful and thoughtful about where and how we create the states that can't be avoided.

I would argue that that's actually a better guide to how we manage complexity in the physical world. Mechanical engineers generally like to minimize the number of moving parts in a system. When they can't avoid moving parts, they tend to fixate on them, and put a lot of effort into creating linkages and failsafes to try to prevent them from interacting in catastrophic ways.

The software engineering way would be to create extra moving parts just because complicated things make us feel smart, and deal with potential adverse interactions among them by posting signs that say "Careful, now!" without clearly explaining what the reader is supposed to be careful of. 50 years later, people who try to stick to the (very sound!) principles that Backus proposed are still regularly dismissed as being hipsters and pedants.

I'd say that the extra moving parts are there in most cases not because someone wanted to "feel smart" (not that it doesn't happen), but to make the pre-existing moving parts do something that they weren't originally supposed to do, because nobody understands how those pre-existing parts work well enough to re-engineer them properly on the schedule that they are given. We are an industry that builds bridges out of matchsticks, duck tape, and glue, and many of our processes are basically about how to make the result of that "good enough".

I don't think we will ever get the breakthrough you are looking for. Things like design patterns and abstractions are our attempt at this. Eventually you need to trust that however wrote the other code you have to deal with is sane. This assumption is false (and it might be you who is insane thinking they could/would make it work they way you think it does).

We will never get rid of the need for QA. Automated tests are great, I believe in them (Note that I didn't say unit tests or integration tests). Formal proofs appear great (I have never figured out how to prove my code), but as Knuth said "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it". There are many ways code can be meet the spec and yet wrong because in the real world you rarely understand the problem well enough to write a correct spec in the first place. QA should understand the problem well enough to say "this isn't what I expected to happen."

I suppose that depends on the language and the elegance of your programming paradigm. This is where primitive simplicity becomes important, because when your foundation is composed of very few things that are not dependent upon each other you can scale almost indefinitely in every direction.

Imagine you are limited to only a few ingredients in programming: statements, expressions, functions, objects, arrays, and operators that are not overloaded. That list does not contain classes, inheritance, declarative helpers, or a bunch of other things. With a list of ingredients so small no internal structure or paradigm is imposed on you, so you are free to create any design decisions that you want. Those creative decisions about the organization of things is how you dictate the scale of it all.

Most people, though, cannot operate like that. They claim to want the freedom of infinite scale, but they just need a little help. With more help supplied by the language, framework, whatever the less freedom you have to make your own decisions. Eventually there is so much help that all you do as a programmer is contend with that helpful goodness without any chance to scale things in any direction.

> protocols, conventions, failsafes, QA teams, etc, etc that are either still hugely difficult to contribute to (Linux kernel, web browsers, etc)

To be fair here, I don't think it's reasonable to expect that once you have "software development skills" it automatically gives you the ability to fix any code out there. The Linux Kernel and web browsers are not hard to contribute to because of conventions, they're hard because most of that code requires a lot of outside knowledge of things like hardware or HTML spec, etc.

The actual submitting part isn't the easiest, but it's well documented if you go looking, I'm pretty sure most people could handle it if they really had a fix they wanted to submit.

There are multiple reasons that contributing to various projects may be difficult. But, I was replying to a specific comment about writing code in a way that is easy to understand, and the comment author's acknowledgement that this idea/practice is hard to scale to a large number of developers (presumably because everyone's skills are different and because we each have different ideas about what is "clear", etc).

So, my comment was specifically about code. Yes, developing a kernel driver requires knowledge of the hardware and its quirks. But, if we're just talking about the code, why shouldn't a competent C developer be able to read the code for an existing hardware driver and come away understanding the hardware?

And what about the parts that are NOT related to fiddly hardware? For example, look at all of the recent drama with the Linux filesystem maintainer(s) and interfacing with Rust code. Forget the actual human drama aspect, but just think about the technical code aspect: The Rust devs can't even figure out what the C code's semantics are, and the lead filesystem guy made some embarrassing outbursts saying that he wasn't going to help them by explaining what the actual interface contracts are. It's probably because he doesn't even know what his own section of the kernel does in the kind of detail that they're asking for... That last part is my own speculation, but these Rust guys are also competent at working with C code and they can't figure out what assumptions are baked into the C APIs.

Web browser code has less to do with nitty gritty hardware. Yet, even a very competent C++ dev is going to have a ton of trouble figuring out the Chromium code base. It's just too hard to keep trying to use our current tools for these giant, complex, software projects. No amount of convention or linting or writing your classes and functions to be "easy to understand" is going to really matter in the big picture. Naming variables is hard and important to do well, but at the scale of these projects, individual variable names simply don't matter. It's hard to even figure out what code is being executed in a given context/operation.

> Yet, even a very competent C++ dev is going to have a ton of trouble figuring out the Chromium code base.

I don't think this is true, or at least it wasn't circa 2018 when I was writing C++ professionally and semi-competently. I sometimes had to read, understand and change parts of the Chromium code base since I was working on a component which integrated CEF. Over time I began to think of Chromium as a good reference for how to maintain a well-organized C++ code base. It's remarkably plain and understandable, greppable even. Eventually I was able to contribute a patch or two back to CEF.

The hardest thing by far with respect to making those contributions wasn't understanding the C++, it was understanding how to work the build system for development tasks.

Also agree that the example code base is not the best example to use.

The Chromium code base is a joy to read and I would routinely spend hours just reading it to understand deeper topics relating to the JS runtime.

Compared to my company's much smaller code base that would take hours just to understand the most simplest things because it was written so terribly.

That's true, and fair point for the example not being the best one. It was several years ago that I was poking at the Chromium code base to investigate something. I don't honestly remember much about the code itself, but I do remember struggling with the build system like you said. And that's probably why I just remember the whole endeavor as being difficult. Though, the build system being so complicated is not totally irrelevant to my point... Understanding how to actually build and use the code has some overlap with the idea of understanding the code or project as a whole.

I guess I just don't really get your point then, it's not like the Linux Kernel or Chromium or Firefox are giant buggy messes that don't work at all. They certainly have bugs but by-and-large they work very well with minimal issues for most people. I also think their codebases are pretty approachable, IMO A competent C or C++ developer can definitely read the code from either one with a little effort - It's not the easiest thing but it's definitely not impossible, most people just don't ever try.

My point was that making meaningful contributions such a big fixes requires understanding how the code is _supposed_ to function vs. how it actually functions, that's the hard part. In the majority of cases that's simply not something the code can tell you, there's no replacement for comparing the code to a datasheet or reading the HTML spec to understand how the rendering engine is supposed to work, and those things take time to learn. For the simpler parts people do actively contribute to those without tons of previous experience (or because they already have experience with a library or etc.).

> My point was that making meaningful contributions such a big fixes requires understanding how the code is _supposed_ to function vs. how it actually functions, that's the hard part. In the majority of cases that's simply not something the code can tell you [...]

That's kind of my point, though. I'm trying to zoom out and "think outside the box" for a minute. It's hard to compose smaller pieces into larger systems if the smaller pieces have behavior that's not very well defined. And our programming languages and tools don't always make it easy for the author of a piece of code to always understand that they introduced some unintended behavior.

To your first point: I'm not shitting on Chromium or Firefox or any other software projects, but they're honestly ALL "buggy messes" in a sense. I'm a middling software dev and the software I write for my day job is definitely more buggy, overall, than these projects. So, I'm not saying that other developers are stupid (quite the opposite!). But, the fact that there are plenty of bugs at any given point in any of these projects is saying something important, IMO. If I use our current programming tools to write a Base64 encode/decode library, I can do a pretty good job and there's a good chance that it'll have zero bugs in a fairly short amount of time. But, using the same tools, there's absolutely no hope that I (we, you, whoever) could write a web browser that doesn't have any bugs. That's actually a problem! We've come to accept it because that's all we've got today, but my point is that this isn't actually an ideal place to settle.

I don't know what the answer is, but I think a lot of people don't even seem to realize there's a problem. My claim is that there is a problem and that our current paradigms and tools simply don't scale well. I'm not creative enough to be the one who has the eureka moment that will bring us to the next stage of our evolution, but I suspect that it's what we'll need to actually be able to achieve complex software that actually works as we intend it to.

> I feel like our programming tools are pretty good for programming in the small, but I suspect we're still waiting for a breakthrough for being able to actually make complex software reliably. (And, no, I don't just mean yet another "framework" or another language that's just C with a fancier type system or novel memory management)

Readability is for human optimization for self or for other people's posterity and code comprehension to the readers mind. We need a new way to visualize/comprehension code that doesn't involve heavy reading and the read's personal capabilities of syntax parsing/comprehension.

This is something we will likely never be able to get right with our current man machine interfaces; keyboard, mouse/touch, video and audio.

Just a thought. As always I reserve the right to be wrong.

Reading is more than enough. What’s often lacking is usually the why? I can understand the code and what it’s doing, but I may not understand the problem (and sub problems) it’s solving . When you can find explanations for that (links to PR discussions, archives of mail threads, and forums post), it’s great. But some don’t bother or it’s somewhere in chat logs.

calculator app on latest macos (sequoia) has a bug today - if you write FF_16 AND FF_16 in the programmer mode and press =, it'll display the correct result - FF_16, but the history view displays 0_16 AND FF_16 for some reason.

> macOS is produced by the richest company on Earth and a few years ago the CALCULATOR app had a bug that made it give the wrong answers...

This is stated as if surprising, presumably because we think of a calculator app as a simple thing, but it probably shouldn't be that surprising--surely the calculator app isn't used that often, and so doesn't get much in-the-field testing. Maybe you've occasionally used the calculator in Spotlight, but have you ever opened the app? I don't think I have in 20 years.

I think this is backwards. A calculator app should be a simple thing. There's nothing undefined or novel about a calculator app. You can buy a much more capable physical calculator from Texas Instruments for less than $100 and I'm pretty sure the CPU in one of those is just an ant with some pen and paper.

You and I only think it's complex because we've become accustomed to everything being complex when it comes to writing software. That's my point. The mathematical operations are not hard (even the "fancy" ones like the trig functions). Formatting a number to be displayed is also not hard (again, those $100 calculators do it just fine). So, why is it so hard to write the world's 100,000th calculator app that the world's highest paid developers can't get it 100% perfect? There's something super wrong with our situation that it's even possible to have a race condition between the graphical effects and the actual math code that causes the calculator to display the wrong results.

If we weren't forced to build a skyscraper with Lego bricks, we might stand a better chance.

> That's my point. The mathematical operations are not hard (even the "fancy" ones like the trig functions). Formatting a number to be displayed is also not hard (again, those $100 calculators do it just fine).

Right, and that's my point: if all you want is a rock-solid computational platform, then you can use, for example, `bc`. (That's what I do.) I assume that Apple assumes that their users want something fancier than that, and it's there, with the fanciness of a shiny user interface on a less-exercised code path, that the bugs will inevitably come.

'bc' was first released literally half a century ago. If that is still the state of the art, I think it is absolutely fair to sound the alarm that something is VERY wrong with our modern software development practices. We shouldn't have to choose between "modern GUI" and "works".

(For what it's worth, Qalculate destroys both bc and the Mac calculator app in both command line and GUI categories, so making working software isn't entirely a lost art.)

Constantly, to keep the results of a calculation on screen. It's fallacious to assume that your own usage patterns are common. Hell, with as much evidence as you (none), I would venture that more people use the Calculator app than know that you can type calculations in Spotlight at all.

> It's fallacious to assume that your own usage patterns are common. Hell, with as much evidence as you (none) ….

I don't assume that my usage pattern is common. (My usage pattern is to drop to `bc`.) I assume that Calculator usage isn't common, but, recognizing that that is an assumption and that the only way to get evidence is to ask, I asked:

> Maybe you've occasionally used the calculator in Spotlight, but have you ever opened the app?

And you answered, so now together we have double the evidence that I alone did before. :-)

We've been there, done that. CRUD apps on mainframes and minis had incredibly powerful and productive languages and frameworks (Quick, Quiz, QTP: you're remembered and missed.) Problem is, they were TUI (terminal UI), isolated, and extremely focused; i.e. limited. They functioned, but would be like straight-jackets to modern users.

(Speaking of... has anyone done a 80x24 TUI client for HN? That would be interesting to play with.)

> has anyone done a 80x24 TUI client for HN

lynx still exists

yes: https://github.com/aome510/hackernews-TUI

Works a treat :)