Comment by dismalaf
1 day ago
As long as I've followed the software industry there's always been people saying "blah blah craftsmanship blah". The fact is, people don't care about craftsmanship. You can't see the code of most of the software you use and even when you can (FOSS), who's actually looking?
Also, the few times I've use "handcrafted" software it's underwhelming in terms of functionality, apart from a few FOSS programs that have thousands of contributors.
Life is short and hardware is relatively cheap.
Everything you use every day depends on a few core libraries and services that are truly crafted by some competent people. Take your browser and all the various fantastic libraries it uses to decode and display content to you. How about cryptography libraries like OpenSSL? Linux itself, I would consider the result of craftsmanship, same with most GNU software. You're really, really, really missing a lot here with your evaluation.
You're right, people don't care about craftsmanship, until their vibe coded TLS implementation causes their government to track them down and have them executed. Then, suddenly, it matters.
People don't "care" about material science either. Without it, we'd be screwed.
Yes, I did mention that there's a few FOSS projects that are handcrafted that work because of lots of contributors or at least eyes (I guess I should have also mentioned corporate maintainers). Foundational libraries, Linux kernel, stuff like that.
But on the whole, a lot of software (mostly user facing) is pretty bloated, filled with bugs and no one cares.
The people who care about craftsmanship, trust that you care.
When friends and family ask me about which software to buy/use/install, I recommend them something that I think is well crafted. They ask me, because they know I care.
So what do you recommend?