alt Hacker NewsSomething weird happened to software after the 90s or so.
You had all these small-by-modern-standards teams (though sometimes in large companies) putting out desktop applications, sometimes on multiple platforms, with shitloads of features. On fairly tight schedules. To address markets that are itty-bitty by modern standards.
Now people are like “We’ll need (3x the personnel) and (2x the time) and you can forget about native, it’s webshit or else you can double those figures… for one platform. What’s that? Your TAM is only (the size of the entire home PC market circa 1995)? Oh forget about it then, you’ll never get funded”
It seems like we’ve gotten far less efficient.
I’m skeptical this problem has to do with code-writing, and so am skeptical that LLMs are going to even get us back to our former baseline.
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Part of this is the huge ZIRP-driven salary bubble in the US. If good software engineers were as cheap as good structural engineers, you'd be able to stick three of them in a room for $500k a year and add a part-time manager and they'd churn out line-of-business software for some weird little niche that saves 50 skilled-employee-years per year and costs $20k a seat.
The bubble means that a) the salaries are higher, b) the total addressable market has to justify those salaries, c) everyone cargo cults the success stories, and so d) the best practices are all based on the idea that you're going to hyperscale and therefore need a bazillion microservices hooked up to multiple distributed databases that either use atomic clocks or are only eventually consistent, distributed queues and logs for everything, four separate UIs that work on web/iOS/android/desktop, an entire hadoop cluster, some kind of k8s/mesos/ECS abomination, etc.
The rest of the world, and apparently even the rest of the US, has engineering that looks a little more like this, but it's still influenced by hyperscaler best practices.
Yep. Software construction was branded a team sport. Hence, social coding, tool quality being considered more important (good thing for sure), and, arguably, less emphasis on individual skill and agency.
This was in service of a time when tech was the great equalizer, powered by ZIRP. It also dovetailed perfectly with middle managers needing more reports in fast growing tech companies. Perhaps the pendulum is swinging back from the overly collective focus we had during the 2010s.
Circa 2005 my boss and I would pitch that the relational database + HTML forms paradigm was a breakthrough that put custom software within reach of more customers: for one thing you could just delete all the Installshield engineers but also memory safety was a big problem in the Win95 era not so much about being hacked and more about application state in applications would get corrupted over time so you just expected Word to crash once an hour or so.
> Something weird happened to software after the 90s or so.
Counterpoint: What might have happened is that we expect software to do a lot more than we did in the 90s, and we really don't expect our software features to be static after purchase.
I agree that we sometimes make things incredibly complex for no purpose in SE, but also think that we do a rose-colored thing where we forget how shitty things were in the 1990s.
This needs to be said more. Software used to be so much better, and so was tooling.
While it wasn't perfect, I'd argue software got much worse, and I blame SaaSification and the push for web-based centralization.
Take for example, Docker. Linux suffered from an issue of hosting servers in a standardized, and isolated manner.
The kernel already had all those features to make it work, all we needed was a nice userland to take advantage of it.
What was needed was a small loader program that set up the sandbox and then started executing the target software.
What we got was Docker, which somehow came with its own daemon (what about cron, systemd etc), way of doing IPC (we had that), package distribution format (why not leave stuff on the disk), weird shit (layers wtf), repository (we had that as well), and CLI (why).
All this stuff was wrapped into a nice package you have to pay monthly subscription fees for.
Duplicating and enshittifying standard system functions, what a way to go.
Some thoughts:
1. Personally I find writing software for the web far more difficult/tedious than desktop. We sure settled on the lowest common denominator
1a. Perhaps part of that is that the web doesn't really afford the same level of WYSIWYG?
2. Is it perhaps more difficult (superlinear) to write one cloud SaaS product that can scale to the whole world, rather than apps for which each installation only needed to scale to one client? Oh and make sure to retain perfect separation between clients
2a. To make everything scale, it's super distributed, but having everything so distributed has a huge cost
3. Some level of DLL hell, but something different (update hell?) I barely do any programming in my free time anymore because I would end up spending almost the whole time needing to deal with some barrage of updates, to the IDE, to the framework, to the libraries, to the build infrastructure
3a. There's always a cost to shipping, to the development team and/or the users. With releases so frequent, that cost is paid constantly and/or unpredictably (from the development or user perspective)
3b. Is there any mental sense of completion/accomplishment anymore or just a never-ending always-accelerating treadmill?
3c. I wish I could find the source but there was some joke that said "software developers are arrogant or naïve enough to think that if you take a marathon and just break it up into smaller parts you can 'sprint' the whole way"