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'It Just Seems That Nobody is Interested in Building Quality, Fast, Efficient, Lasting, Foundational Stuff Anymore' (tonsky.me)
Nikita Prokopov, a software programmer and author of Fira Code, a popular programming font, AnyBar, a universal status indicator, and some open-source Clojure libraries, writes: Remember times when an OS, apps and all your data fit on a floppy? Your desktop todo app is probably written in Electron and thus has userland driver for Xbox 360 controller in it, can render 3d graphics and play audio and take photos with your web camera. A simple text chat is notorious for its load speed and memory consumption. Yes, you really have to count Slack in as a resource-heavy application. I mean, chatroom and barebones text editor, those are supposed to be two of the less demanding apps in the whole world. Welcome to 2018.
At least it works, you might say. Well, bigger doesn't imply better. Bigger means someone has lost control. Bigger means we don't know what's going on. Bigger means complexity tax, performance tax, reliability tax. This is not the norm and should not become the norm. Overweight apps should mean a red flag. They should mean run away scared. 16Gb Android phone was perfectly fine 3 years ago. Today with Android 8.1 it's barely usable because each app has become at least twice as big for no apparent reason. There are no additional functions. They are not faster or more optimized. They don't look different. They just...grow?
iPhone 4s was released with iOS 5, but can barely run iOS 9. And it's not because iOS 9 is that much superior -- it's basically the same. But their new hardware is faster, so they made software slower. Don't worry -- you got exciting new capabilities like...running the same apps with the same speed! I dunno. [...] Nobody understands anything at this point. Neither they want to. We just throw barely baked shit out there, hope for the best and call it "startup wisdom." Web pages ask you to refresh if anything goes wrong. Who has time to figure out what happened? Any web app produces a constant stream of "random" JS errors in the wild, even on compatible browsers.
[...] It just seems that nobody is interested in building quality, fast, efficient, lasting, foundational stuff anymore. Even when efficient solutions have been known for ages, we still struggle with the same problems: package management, build systems, compilers, language design, IDEs. Build systems are inherently unreliable and periodically require full clean, even though all info for invalidation is there. Nothing stops us from making build process reliable, predictable and 100% reproducible. Just nobody thinks it's important. NPM has stayed in "sometimes works" state for years.
At least it works, you might say. Well, bigger doesn't imply better. Bigger means someone has lost control. Bigger means we don't know what's going on. Bigger means complexity tax, performance tax, reliability tax. This is not the norm and should not become the norm. Overweight apps should mean a red flag. They should mean run away scared. 16Gb Android phone was perfectly fine 3 years ago. Today with Android 8.1 it's barely usable because each app has become at least twice as big for no apparent reason. There are no additional functions. They are not faster or more optimized. They don't look different. They just...grow?
iPhone 4s was released with iOS 5, but can barely run iOS 9. And it's not because iOS 9 is that much superior -- it's basically the same. But their new hardware is faster, so they made software slower. Don't worry -- you got exciting new capabilities like...running the same apps with the same speed! I dunno. [...] Nobody understands anything at this point. Neither they want to. We just throw barely baked shit out there, hope for the best and call it "startup wisdom." Web pages ask you to refresh if anything goes wrong. Who has time to figure out what happened? Any web app produces a constant stream of "random" JS errors in the wild, even on compatible browsers.
[...] It just seems that nobody is interested in building quality, fast, efficient, lasting, foundational stuff anymore. Even when efficient solutions have been known for ages, we still struggle with the same problems: package management, build systems, compilers, language design, IDEs. Build systems are inherently unreliable and periodically require full clean, even though all info for invalidation is there. Nothing stops us from making build process reliable, predictable and 100% reproducible. Just nobody thinks it's important. NPM has stayed in "sometimes works" state for years.
Every now and then Apple does take a step back and work towards making things smaller and faster instead of just newer.
iOS 12 spent a lot of time on just that, especially on making sure the latest software was actually making the oldest devices faster, Reports were the execs were all carrying around iPhone 6 and 6s units for the last few weeks making sure they felt usable.
Similarly OSX has improved in the same way this year, being faster on older hardware - finding my 2010 MacBook Pro still well supported.
I think as developers one thing we can all do to help reverse this trend is to simply be very, very careful about inclusion of third party libraries. That's where a lot of the bloat comes in, you add a few libraries and maybe it has a few dependencies and after a short time you are building in 20-30 subprojetts. Madness.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not only do we write document scan and OCR software (ExactScan, OCRKit, Recompres, etc.) that fits on a couple of floppies (well ExactScan non Pro would fit on two 1.44MB I guess), without hundreds of imported dependecies and such: https://exactcode.com/ – On my new youtube channel I recently showed how to program hardware accelerated 3d in a couple of hundred lines of code! Enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Letter Perfect for the Atari 800 was an 8K ROM cartridge.
Image: http://www.atarimania.com/utility-atari-400-800-xl-xe-letter-perfect_13691.html
Documentation (100 page PDF): http://www.atarimania.com/8bit/files/letter_perfect.pdf
We've been trained to be a consuming society of disposable goods. The latest and greatest feature will always be more important than something that is reliable and durable for the long haul.
It's not just consumer stuff.
The network team I'm a part of has been dealing with more and more frequent outages, 90% of which are due to bugs in software running our devices. These aren't fly-by-night vendors either, they're the "no one ever got fired for buying X" ones like Cisco, F5, Palo Alto, EMC, etc.
10 years ago, outages were 10% bugs, and 90% human error, now it seems to be the other way around. Everyone's chasing features, because that's what sells, so there's no time for efficiency/stability/security any more.
You don't recall the QNX demo floppy? It fit a multitasking networked OS that even included a Doom demo. Shit today is just bloated.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Tires that last the life of the car ride like shit. For a while, you could buy a 120k mi consumer tire (I sold tired in college). They did hold up as well as they said, but you felt you were riding on a school bus. People frequently brought them back.
I hate fat people.
The Kuhn Rikon Swiss Peeler. Go into any high-end restaurant kitchen, and there's a good chance you'll find a couple of these marvels. You, the home cook, can own this wonder too, but it will set you back: $4.49.
Now go into a home kitchen supply store and you'll find peeling gizmos costing four or five times as much that don't work as well. Somebody once gave me a Wustof peeler that costs over $50, and you know what? It's just as good as the Rikon at over 10x the price. It's pretty to look at, and nicer to hold, but it doesn't get your spuds naked any faster.
So why do people shell out $20,$30, even $50 for a vegetable peeler if the best peeler in the world? Because of what I call the "SUV theory of marketing": people equate heavyweight with quality, not design, performance or durability.
Office automation software hit Rikon Swiss levels of quality twenty years ago. It's possible that iOS hit Rikon Swiss levels of quality around five years ago, with support for the A7 secure enclave. After you get to a certain point, the only way to add to perceived quality is to do stuff that adds weight. Looking at iOS releases, it's probably fair to say that there have been some genuine functional improvements since iOS 7, in areas like multitasking and battery life. A lot of changes are superficial stylistic ones that dont' really matter. In some ways the operating system has found new ways to be intrusive on your attention. Those superficial changes are all excess weight added to create the perception of quality.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There is one place where people still produce stuff like the OP wants, and that's embedded. Not IoT wank, but real embedded, running on CPUs clocked at tens of MHz with RAM in two-digit kilobyte (not megabyte or gigabyte) quantities. And a lot of that stuff is written to very exacting standards, particularly where something like realtime control and/or safety is involved.
The one problem in this area is the endless battle with standards morons who begin each standard with an implicit "assume an infinitely fast CPU with infinite RAM...". The number of standards meetings I've sat through where we've been met with total incomprehension, I mean literally a total inability to comprehend, that something has to operate on anything less than a multi-GHz CPU with gigabytes of RAM....
Interestingly, as much as we all hate subscription models from companies like Abode and Microsoft, those subscription models do give these companies more of an incentive to focus on stability, efficiency, and security instead of features. Of coarse, they will probably just profit more and do less overall development but stability and quality will get better with fewer new "features" added.
Do you have any idea how much support subscriptions for Cisco/F5/Palo Alto/EMC gear cost per year? Hundreds of thousands a year for two smallish data centers' worth. They STILL can't get it stable.
(As I'm writing this, my VP just walked by telling someone, "OK, it's escalated to EMC".)
At least as of 2018 that's 78% living paycheck to paycheck.
OK. So, assuming an estimated population of 325,000,000, that means that that 253,500,000 people live paycheck to paycheck and 71,500,000 do not. Of those 71,500,000, more than 90,000,000 own an iPhone. That's right. Mathematically, at least 10% of the US population that supposedly lives to paycheck must own an iPhone for the sales figures to work out. Meaning that if iPhone owners account for every single American who is not in financial distress and then some, that means every single owner of a top of the line Samsung phone comes from the financially distressed segment of the population.
Are there people who live paycheck to paycheck because of legitimate financial hardships that are outside their control? Yes. Is it the absurdly high figure that you trot out in every one of these discussion? Not a chance.
The fact remains that many, or more likely most, people who live paycheck to paycheck live paycheck to paycheck because of their own lifestyle choices. If what you said was true, then I would expect that there would be 4 or 5 budget smart phones sold for every iPhone and high end Samsung. Instead, the opposite is true. That simply cannot happen without a generous helping of personal choice on the part of most consumers. No class warfare needed here.