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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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I'm mentally OVERDRAWN! What's that SIGNPOST up ahead? Where's ROD
STERLING when you really need him?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday October 04 2018, @04:15AM
When I worked at Apple in the mid-nineties they were generally doing a good job at shipping quality software. I won't say on time or on budget, but what actually got into end-users' hands generally worked well.
I credit some of this to Apple's requirement that all new projects have enthusiastic ERS sign-off: Engineering Requirements Summary. Not just the managers had to sign the ERSes but also the coders who would implement them.
I read the ERS for the PowerPC Dynamic Recompiling 68k Emulator. I'm afraid that document was very much under NDA so I can't tell you how that emulator actually worked, but I can say its ERS was lucidly and concisely written, and at the time I felt that all I really required to have written that emulator myself was to have read the ERS.
But I've also worked at places where it was all to common for the management to say "We'd make a killing if we published $SHINY Just In Time For Christmas". And in fact at one company that was a contract shop, the lawyers spent an extra month hammering out the contract for something that really did require it be in customer hands by black friday, so we all worked 24/7 to get it there.
We really did, which speaks to the competence of our engineering staff, but I really would have liked to have beaten both parties' attorneys to death with my bare hands.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]