Comment by godelski
1 month ago
> Unironically, I want finished software.
I don't think software is ever finished.
But I'd definitely love to not be shipped alpha or beta software. MVPs are great when hacking, but why are we shipping hacked together stuff. "It works" doesn't mean it actually works...
> I don't think software is ever finished.
Back when it came on physical media, it was very much finished. Needing an update to fix a critical bug or a UX issue was a very costly problem to have, both in money and in reputation. Users had to be convinced to buy and install major updates, instead of being strong-armed into it. Staying on an older version was easier, and in case of operating systems, much more widely accepted.
Many video games fall into that category even today. Sure, the "we can always release an update" mentality did infest game developers as well, but, unlike apps and OSes, most games do have a finite scope and stop being developed once that scope has been realized.
That's also not true and I think you're not reading my point fairly. Back when software came on physical media we still had patches. We had patches that came through the internet and we had patches that came through physical media. The latter making it harder to patch.
It's a great situation when a bug is discovered and it is hard to patch.
You're fantasizing about a time that never existed. Software isn't "ever finished" because we are not omniscient writers who can foresee all problems, fix all bugs, and write software that is unhackable. That's the mindset that "all tests pass" or "it works for me" means the software "works."
We can't address the problems, as discussed in the article and that I mentioned in my comment, if we're going to retcon history and redirect ourselves to a worse environment. That doesn't fix anything.
We'll never be omniscient, sorry. The world changes. Hardware changes. Software rots. Time marches on. These do not change and we have to operate in a world where we acknowledge these basic facts of reality. We'll never make decent software if we can't acknowledge reality first.
> Back when software came on physical media we still had patches. We had patches that came through the internet and we had patches that came through physical media.
Did you live at a time where Internet was not a thing?
I remember very clearly buying software on physical media and never, ever "receiving" a single patch. I don't even know how that would have looked... "buy this floppy disk, it's a patch for a bug in the other floppy disk you bought recently"?
I remember being able to buy "the next version", though. But the expectation was that I was buying a "finished" version, not something unfinished that required me to buy all the next versions.
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> we are not omniscient writers who can foresee all problems, fix all bugs, and write software that is unhackable
We can come close to that in all other areas of engineering, but somehow not software? We can build buildings and bridges and be certain that they won't collapse. We can engineer machines that work reliably and safely. But for some reason we can't do the same for software? I call bullshit.
> Hardware changes.
And operating systems do need to be updated for that sometimes, sure. They would even sometimes need to expose new APIs to apps, so the apps could make use of new hardware capabilities. However, there isn't much reason to update an OS on existing hardware. Especially when all that update does is bring a new stupider UI design that no one asked for.
> Software rots.
What the heck do you even mean by that? Software is a sequence of CPU instructions. It can't "rot". It's the runtime environments that rot for no good reason.
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