Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

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I find this fascinating because it speaks to the challenge of software that is 'done'.

Most people are familiar with software that is 'good enough to ship, could do more' where the software goes through release cycles and gets features added Etc. But sometimes, and this more common with embedded programmers, the programming is 'done.' All the features you could reasonably want are implemented, bugs as they come up are swatted, but basically the software itself is as it is and will be forever. Its done.

I expect to see more of this over the coming decade. While it is certainly true you can reimagine and reimagine, and of course you might want to port from form factor or OS to another, but the kinds of things that non-developer's do with computers is like a monte carlo plot getting more and more samples.

Personally I think its a Good Thing, as it might stem some of the gratuitous changes we see on things. It also has the chance of making the world a bit more stable.

software that is 'done'.

Kind of interesting that this doesn't appear to have explicititely happened very often before with email software -- but intuition might imply that it should have.

So far it has been much more common with say, networking code. Boring code which does what it does, and well you just don't need to rewrite it. Feature clamor in mail applications has gone way down with web based mail tools and smart phones. Much of the change in web browsers has gone 'internal' where its about faster JS execution or WebGL or something else like that.

Interesting times.

> Kind of interesting that this doesn't appear to have explicititely happened very often before with email software -- but intuition might imply that it should have.

It most certainly did.

Pine

Mutt

Eudora

All are basically done, and are maintenance only. Pine turned into Alpine which added unicode, and that's about it.

There is actually a lot of software where this happens. Tex, and gzip come to mind immediately. I'm sure there is more.

It should have happened with Thunderbird some time ago. Thunderbird is one of those programs where my heart would sink as soon as I learned there was a new update queued up. They always break something.

Oh come on, you love the multi-tab whatever that was forced on everybody. Thunderbird has definitely had some Gnome3-caliber failures.

The problem with their tabs is that they put different things on the same sized window. I like my overall Tbird to be almost full screened. But I like messages relatively narrow, because I (and people) generally read less efficiently if the lines are really long; it's harder to track back to the beginning of the next line accurately.

I like tabs in urxvt, vim, Firefox, etc. But they don't work well for me in Tbird.

Speaking of features, does Thunderbird have a built-in Gmail-like conversation view yet? There's an extension, but eight years after Gmail, do people really still not want this enough for it to be a core feature? Many other email clients have it, and it's much nicer than a message list.

Disclaimer: I haven't used Thunderbird for years, but I'm not too satisfied with the clients I'm currently using.

Still implemented as an add-on.

Thunderbird is far from 'done'. They had plans to replace somewhat problematic Mork format with SQLite based storage since 2008, and it was never implemented.

Software can't be "done". Webmail was done, then gmail came along. Phone calls were done, then google voice came along. Mobile phones were done, then iPhone came along.

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