
Modern software is at its worst - adito
http://weeb.ddns.net/0/articles/modern_software_is_at_its_worst.txt
======
kelvin0
Ah yes, the good old days: When cars had carburetors (and none of that fancy
electronic stuff), maintenance was so much simpler. Cold weather sometimes got
in the way of starting up, but once you were running, the joy!

Using punch cards and mainframes really forced the programmer to think his
solution through and optimize the hell out of it. Once in a while your cards
would not get entered properly, but in the end this made you a better
programmer even if you are still in therapy for it.

When games had less than 16 colors, and all you needed were a few pixels on a
cathod ray tube. Playing Pong, and Tennis and hockey all on the same machine!
Sometimes you'd forget which one you where playing, but that was also part of
the fun!

Progress entails transitions, and we are now transitioning. It is sometimes
painful and ugly, but it's always necessary unless you stay static forever ...

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
The way I remember it, carburetors were finicky, needed tuning, and could fail
in all sorts of interesting ways.

~~~
kelvin0
Yes, my post was meant to be sarcastic, clearly the 'old' is not always
'good'. It's a counter point to the OP's rant.

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elnygren
This. I spend probably 4GB+ RAM only to send IMs to people. (I run WhatsApp,
Telegram, Slack and Chrome/Facebook)

The sad fact is that the general public only seems to care about the fancy
buttons. And from a business standpoint, cheap software (high level
langs/tools that are bad for perf) and following current design trends are
more important than CPU cycles.

Perhaps we'll see some kind of "back to the basics" movement in the future
where UI and software becomes much more simpler.

~~~
na85
There used to be little animated gifs that we'd put on our Geocities pages
with flashing "thank you for not using AOL" or "don't surf and AOL" slogans.

IMHO the web needs a movement akin to "nosql", but for bloated crap like
JavaScript.

My web browsing experience has only improved after installing noscript.

~~~
jasonkostempski
I think the world is starting down this path, this is the second link to a
.txt file in my news feed today :) I've recently been longing for a way to
easily filter the internet to text/plain only content, not only is there no
bloat, the content tends to have actual substance.

Edit: Holy smokes, the site hosting the content is what I'm talking about
[http://weeb.ddns.net/1/gopher](http://weeb.ddns.net/1/gopher) I'd still like
a text/plain only Google though, I'd be willing to POST the search request for
such a thing via cURL.

~~~
sanderjd
This was also the second link I followed to a text file today, both on this
domain (same author?). I went through the hassle of pinch-zooming to make the
first one sort-of legible on my phone, because the content (C without the
stdlib) was worth it, but I immediately hit the back button on this one. I
really don't understand the inclination to make things harder to use, for what
purpose, nostalgia?

~~~
stiGGG
Same here. Tried to read the "C without the stdlib" article on my phone, it
was only readable in landscape mode and i gave up after the third time the
screen rotated and i lost the line where i was reading. I tried it later on my
desktop with 27" screen and all the content was aligned to left, keeping 80%
of the screen black. I opened developer tools to align the content to the
middle and wondered where the layout came from, there was almost no css. Then
i realised that the author did every linebreak manually with a <br> in html.
Yeah that's oldschool... _facepalm_

~~~
Qwertystop
According to the bit at the top, it's proxied from gopher. The column width
limit is probably automatically inserted by the intermediary.

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freehunter
So this is just a txt file on a server... why is it completely blank when I
open it? I could understand if there was a SQL database and a heavy PHP
application serving requests and the system ran out of memory or Apache ran
out of open connections... but it's a txt file. I could even see there being
an incompatibility between my browser and the site's coding. Maybe they're
using fancy new Javascript techniques or their CSS doesn't play well with
Safari... but it's a txt file.

I guess it's modern software at its worst: we can't even display a plaintext
file in the browser reliably.

~~~
eis
From what I understood it's actually a proxy to some gopher server. And it
returns an HTML page with css etc and not just a txt file. Funny stuff.

------
cr3ative
Author complains of UI design degrading, later goes on to mention "(the URL is
actually one line, had to split it to fit into 67 char width)".

Fantastic.

~~~
goda90
It's like he reacted to overly complicated websites by going to another
extreme of making a text document on gopher. Simple HTML on www would have
made his point beautifully and been functional so that I didn't have to copy
paste the URL.

~~~
cellularmitosis
Philip Greenspun's site has always been my golden standard of what you can do
with minimal, hand-edited HTML.
[http://philip.greenspun.com/writing/](http://philip.greenspun.com/writing/)

~~~
leadingthenet
Is it, though? I find it extremely difficult to read paragraphs that are that
wide.

~~~
goda90
You could always shrink your window.

------
goalieca
I'd prefer it if most web sites were textual. Also, disabling JavaScript can
have some hilarious effects for some web pages :D

~~~
Nadya
I agree. Most blogs should not require Javascript to read - that includes GA.
Just a little bit of styling to aid readability and you should be set.

Related:

motherfuckingwebsite.com & bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com

------
blauditore
I think the main reason for worse performance is not adding unnecessary
features or covering lazyness. It's due to additional complexity introduced by
additional layers like VMs, sandboxes and frameworks. These things make
development more fun, quicker, cheaper and easier to target more platforms. I
think software wouldn't have evolved so fast if every dev was still doing
manual memory management in C.

Don't get me wrong, close-to-metal coding and native, fast UIs are wonderful
where appropriate, but there's no sense in doing it for every small cookie
bakery website.

------
kichik
I think the sacrifice is worth it. Frameworks and ever growing abstractions
mean more people with less experience can implement more ideas faster. We get
faster iterations which means more features that help real people get stuff
done.

This trend actually helps more people than ever use computers for an ever
growing array of purposes. Back in the good old days you had to hire
developers from a very small group of qualified individuals and then have them
spend months on optimizing new code they just wrote instead of using an
existing framework. Today you can just read a tutorial online and create a
usable POC yourself. This opens so many doors to both developers and new
users.

The resource heavy UI practices actually attract more users. Average users
don't want dense console UIs or old fashioned native Windows forms. They want
a touch app on their mobile that just works. All the tools we have today allow
easily sharing and customizing UI components. This in turn fuels fast
iteration and improvement of UI so that actual users actually want to use it.

All this doesn't mean you have to be lazy and just freely consume as many
resources as you can. It also doesn't mean you shouldn't shame applications
for being slow (I'm looking at you Slack for desktop...) or resource hungry
like the examples in the article. But overall I think we are definitely going
in the right direction.

------
ieatkittens
Ironically, the text is too small to read on my Android HN client. No zooming
either.

------
scandox
This debate will never end. Money. It's money. Start talking to the guy who
pays the pipers, not the pipers. Although, unfortunately they won't read your
blog because it isn't on Facebook.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
The guy that actually pays the piper doesn't even have an opinion on stuff
like this.

------
anc84
Archived copy:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20161129135442/http://weeb.ddns....](https://web.archive.org/web/20161129135442/http://weeb.ddns.net/0/articles/modern_software_is_at_its_worst.txt)

I guess this might explain why it broke: _Hello there! You are currently
visiting gopherspace through a proxy._

------
ArkyBeagle
The modern software industry can't even come up with a coherent mechanism to
evaluate what it produces. It's factionalized according to everyone's path
through life.

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vilmosi
Kind of ironic complaining about UX, given the website...

~~~
ArkyBeagle
I prefer that sort of UX. It places the principle of least surprise first. But
then again, I'm not defending a budget for "doing UX." I just wanna be able to
read the thing.

------
ggasp
Hacker News is at its worst.

