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Software Disenchantment (tonsky.me)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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Recently re-discovered this gem of a blog post, written in 2018 by Nikita Propokov, about his disenchantment with the state of modern software. Do you think it's still relevant today (perhaps more/less so than it was when it was written)?

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[–] 25 points 2 years ago (2 children)

IMO, it's more relevant today than it was when written. None of the problems called out in the post have been addressed, and many have gotten worse.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Why would it get better? Higher level programming is faster and saves companies money… they’re not going back to super efficient assembly or something to make xyz from scratch.

    Article has a bit of an “old man yelling at clouds” sort of vibe.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It does have that vibe, but it's unarguably true that a lot of software and websites are ridiculously bloated and slow.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    7 years ago when I started my career, My first project we sat down and designed the program and interfaces.

    Today, we implement features using best practices, never sitting down to design and end up accumulating technical debt that we don't have funds or time to go back and fix.

    Time to market is proportional to time to obsoletence. We don't design for longevity anymore :(

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    My current project is building a (almost) 1gb Java rich client which takes around 2minites to load... while it's merely a gui with some small client to client capabilities. The technical debt is insane, and it's only getting worse because neither can they afford to rebuild it from scratch.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Basically anything above assembly is a high level language. The article is not about making everything from scratch. It's about thinking about what you're doing and not just being lazy.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    I don't think it's about laziness, but rather about having deadlines set by management that you can only possible meet by reusing stuff as much as possible - even if you only actually need 5 % of this stuff but got to package everything of it in your application for it to work.

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