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Nikita Prokopov has written a blog post detailing disenchantment with current software development. He has been writing software for 15 years and now regards the industry’s growing lack of care for efficiency, simplicity, and excellence as a problem to be solved. He addresses the following points one by one:
- Everything is unbearably slow
- Everything is too large
- Bitrot
- Half-baked products get shipped
- The same old problems recur again and again
- Most code has grown too complex to refactor
- Business is uninterested in improvement
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On Disenchantment with the Current State of Software Development
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TOO BAD YOU CAN'T BUY a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin
real fast and freak everybody out.
-- Jack Handey, The New Mexican, 1988.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by edIII on Wednesday October 03 2018, @11:31PM (7 children)
Missed another. You explained why Open Source and FOSS will eventually take over nearly all software. What you missed also explains why Open Source and FOSS will rule software forever.
SECURITY.
We are now reaping what we sowed. There is about 1% of the knowledgeable (referred to as one percenters) that can basically go anywhere and do anything. It's computing, but without any morality or honor. These groups of people have the control they have now because security was forever an afterthought, and greedy shortsighted managers, executives, and shareholders ultimately drove the development process. Now that we've linked so much of the world up the Internet, intertwining our processes with it, creating new dependencies upon it each day, controlling cyberspace effectively means you control meat space. This is also gives rise to mistrust in computing, because governments are not interested in increasing the levels of security, but falling over each other to control exploits and perform mass surveillance of their citizens instead.
I would list proprietary and unmaintainable code as part of the problem. It matters not how high quality it is purported to be, even if it is noticeably free of bugs. That's because security can now only be established by 100% transparency as far down as reasonably possible. That means no blobs or binaries, and we need multiple TPM modules that are Open and controlled by the owner.
At this point we need a new coding paradigm that treats security as paramount. User experience be fucking damned. On the latter note, that's also getting better because of proper 2FA.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday October 04 2018, @04:00AM
there is just too much source, and not enough eyeballs that actually lift a finger - or rather, an eyelid - to inspect that source.
Instead we have my experience with gedit on Slackware a while back, where all the text that was below the visible part of the window simply disappeared into the ether.
Yes really: you could type The Great American Novel into a very very tall window, but when you scrolled back up after typing "The End" you would find that the last page was all that remained.
"Release early and often" is in my opinion the problem and not the solution.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday October 04 2018, @04:02AM (3 children)
your secure software will never be used if you do not place quite a high priority on user experience.
Consider that the Central Intelligence Agency, upon realizing that the President and his cabinet weren't reading their daily intelligence summaries, created a very special cable TV show for a very special, very limited audience.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Fluffeh on Thursday October 04 2018, @05:28AM
I was going to come up with a wisecrack about Fox & Friends being full of fiction unlike the daily presidential briefings and not limited in who can watch... but... some of the excuses given in the past for wars started and actions taken make that seem less funny and witty if you think about them.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @09:07AM (1 child)
TV shows are mostly[1] for entertainment or influencing/brainwashing idiots.
That said, the US and the world would probably have been better off if they shutdown most of the CIA.
[1] Only in a minority of cases they're useful for learning stuff that really is better in video format - e.g. learning how to cook or build something - but the CIA "intelligence summaries" are unlikely to fall into that category.
(Score: 4, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday October 04 2018, @10:31AM
Consider the effort that goes into the CIA World Fact Book.
Quite a lot of CIA publications are unclassified and are posted openly on their website. Several of them - including the transcript of an address to the staff by a former CIA director - are concerned with ways to avoid letting personal bias influence one's analyses.
The CIA Memorial Wall is white marble, with five-point stars carved into each for each clandestine agent that's been killed while on a mission. There aren't as many stars as one would expect. I concluded that the CIA must not have many clandestine agents of its own, rather than much of its intelligence comes from "assets" - foreign citizens who commit treason by spying for the US - as well as "contractors" - not so much like Snowden, but clandestine agents who are paid by the CIA but who aren't CIA employees.
I'm quite certain that the vast majority of CIA employees are analysts who do stuff like read every newspaper in God's Creation so as to keep up to date on America's up-and-coming new enemies.
The CIA also translates foreign academic journals, then publishes these translations in the US. A Caltech astronomer I once worked for used one such translated journal as a Russian source for a review article he wrote.
Review articles summarize the results of a number of other, more-focussed articles. For example I did the data analysis for the age measurements of some globular stellar clusters - one paper per cluster. A review article would then discuss all those papers, so as to draw some conclusion about globular clusters in general.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @04:13AM (1 child)
You forgot that FOSS has gone into "greedy shortsighted" mode with companies taking over.
They are not interested in "done" software, but recurrent income. Thus the "we can't fix that, let's restart" trend. Which of course leads to restarts of huge, complex, messes, which warranty they will never end, and that will require support contracts until end of times. "Let's rewrite the basic libs, the core of the OS, the display systems, the toolkits, the desktops, everything... just make sure when we approach completness of something, we jump ship to the next very new best, and go back to v0.1"
Trully depressing, because they do it from the inside, not from a fork that has to earn foothold by showing clear adventages over the original. And in doing that, they drown the good things by sheer inbalance of size and resources.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday October 04 2018, @10:43AM
Free Software and Open Source Software are _completely_ different things.
Whenever I point this out I'm met by confident jackasses who point out that they both have the same licenses. That does _not_ make Free Software the same as Open Source Software.
The difference between the two is not the choice of licenses, but the _reason_ the license was chosen. I mentioned that to Richard, to which he replied "That is correct".
Richard himself quite a while back told a journalist that the purpose of Free Software is "to build a community" whereas the purpose of Open Source is "efficiency".
I expect that this distinction is quite likely while he doesn't particularly care whether Hurd will ever be finished: it has a community. It's the community that's important, and _not_ the code.
I looked into this after I myself confused Free and Open Source at Kuro5hin. Someone pointed out that "Open Source is the enemy". After carefully studying both Free and Open, I came squarely down on the side of Free Software.
I cooperate with some Open Source projects, I'm not an asshole about it - but software that's purely my own, is Free Software and not Open Source.
Some cluebot had the gall to tell Linux that the Linux Kernel is Free Software because it has the GPL. Linus tore him a new asshole.
When this discussion came up at Advogato, someone explained that "They're fellow travelers".
That's a Communist term for two people who have the same destination but who are enemies of each other: Russia and China repeatedly exchanged fire in Mongolia, and China invaded North Vietnam in 1975. (The NV tore China a new asshole of its own.)
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]