Programming

I remember the 90s when both mac and windows crashed on a daily basis. When was the last time you saw a legitimate BSOD that didn't involve hardware failure? When was the last time you had to reset the PRAM on your mac just to get it to boot?

Not FOSS but commercial software is. The apps just get more bloated and want to suck even more data with each update. Then there is the sites that have hundreds of trackers and third party cookies from everywhere and need 1gb to display 🙄. OK maybe not 1gb but you get the gist.

I think that there are many potential causes, but I would like to add monopolization to the list.

Usually, a bad release spelled the demise of a company, because release times were so long that competitors could take advantage of a bad software release.

People aren't going to switch from windows because they release something bad or buggy, in that case it would already be dead. Windows isn't technically a monopoly, but they have a lot of inertia and there are many programs that only run on windows that people depend on. There is perhaps a limit to how bad windows can be before people abandon it en masse, but they can get away with a lot. The tech world is full of different companies and programs that are in monopolistic-ish positions.

I no longer look forward to updates.
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It seems to me that some software is actually getting worse, and that this is a more recent trend.
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Why does this happen? I don't know, but my own bias suggests that it's because there's less focus on regression testing. Many of the problems I see look like regression bugs to me. A good engineering team could have caught them with automated regression tests, but these days, it seems as though many teams rely on releasing often and then letting users do the testing.

The problem with that approach, however, is that if you don't have good automated tests, fixing one regression may resurrect another.

Every time I see a new update, I think: "I wonder what will break after this update" and postpone them as much as I can. Software updates shouldn't cause anxiety. But they do these days...

Is some software getting worse?

Fixed for ya.

It seems to me that the author doesn't remember all the struggles we had back then with bugs and features not working. And masses of needed functionality that never got skipped into the hands of users. It also strikes me that maybe there is a bit of nostalgia, just a bit of reluctance to change his ways. He found a workflow around the missing functionality that might be blocking for others and he has a harder time adjusting to the new functionality.

A bit like my father that refused to change his workflow, to make images for webpages (all static) he used for different Amiga programs because one could scale the images, one could edit them add lines and stuff, one for helping him make image maps, and they one so they could be converted to jpg/png as anim files used by everything else on the amiga didn't work well on the internet.

Bug testing back then was awful, we never had time to catch any issues but the biggest. The time plan for the release was fixed years ahead, the functionality that was needed was fixed years ahead. All the needed time for testing was eaten up by the developers working into the final skip to customers, trying to make the software actually run. It wasn't uncommon for test teams trying to cramp months of eating into a weekend to have the software skipped on Monday morning. Well including masses of needed bug fixes during that weekend that no one knew what code each issue was actually tested on. Remember that software version control system was almost not used, there was no CI build system all all software was built on some random developers workstation. Maybe, with some additional changes for his or her convenience. No software development has come a long way since the 90s. A very long way!

I have two hypotheses for why some kinds of software grow worse over time. They are not mutually exclusive and, in fact, may both be at work in some cases.

Software has transitioned from merely complex to chaotic. That is, there is so much going on within a piece of software and its interactions with other pieces of software, including the operating system itself, that the mathematics of chaos are often more applicable than logic. In a chaotic system, everything from seemingly trivial differences between two ostensibly identical chips to the order in which software is installed, updated, and executed has an effect on the operating environment, producing unpredictable outcomes. I started thinking about the systems I was using with this in mind sometime in the early 2000s.

The "masters" in the field are not paying enough attention to the "apprentices" and "journeymen. Put another way, there are too many programmers like me left unsupervised. I couldn't have had a successful career without tools like Visual Basic and Access, the masterful documentation and tutorials they came with, and the wisdom to make sure I was never in a position where my software might have more than a dozen users at a time at any one site. Now we have people who don't know enough to use one selection to limit the options for the next selection juggling different software and frameworks trying to work in teams to do the bidding of someone who can barely type. And the end result is supposed to be used by thousands of people on all manner of equipment and network connections.

One reason that open source software seems more reliable is that people like me, even if we think we can contribute, are mostly dissuaded by the very complexity of the process. The few of us who do navigate the system to make a contribution have our offerings carefully scrutinized before acceptance.

Another reason that open source software seems more reliable is that most of it is aimed at those with expertise or desiring expertise. At least in my experience, that cohort is much more tolerant of those things that more casual users find frustrating.

everything went down when we allow web technologies be part of the desktop, everything electron or any other incarnation is an abomination

Modern software is getting more complex, yet the user base is getting less and less technically literate. At the same time software security is a bloody nightmare.

Back in the 90-s if your app crashed, it was an annoyance. Today if an app crashes, it's a possible attack vector to rob your users one way or another. You can't even create a simple and dumb web site anymore, you need a full security infrastructure around it, HTTPS, XSS protection, DDoS protection, etc, etc.

The rise of smart phones and internet in general, added billions of people to the pool of your users. Most of whom don't know the difference between address bar and Google. You have to invest a lot of resources into UI and UX as well as into protecting your application from people who don't understand how to operate computers.

Foolproof design, security and advanced feature sets make modern software ridiculously complex.

Yes. Case in point: there are at least 10 Lemmy iOS apps. I'll give you ten guesses on which ones are actually native Swift...

There are a quite a few Android apps in progress too. How many are written in Kotlin?

@canpolat The article is written from the perspective of a Windows user. I'm not surprised. Software as a whole does not get worse; there are some software which get worse, and some technology getting in the way. And then there is software which get better, not worse too. If you cherry pick, then you can prove any point you want to proven right; especially on a very wide range of topics like software.

Yes. At least since late '90s, and certainly the last 2 decades.

I blame the rise of frameworks, libraries, and IDEs. It's easier for someone who knows nothing to throw some software together and ship it. In the good old days, all software had to be written by someone who knew what they were doing, often in difficult tools. You had to think ahead and write code correctly, because you couldn't just ship patches every week.

And as junior devs get replaced by AI, there won't be any experience for any of them to learn how to do that.