'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.

Comments

Why should they?

[QuietLagoon]

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.

Re:Why should they?

[Anonymous Coward]

and our kids and grandkids will be buried in our electronic wastes.

corporate greed is to blame (the consumer, less so). forced obsolescence for the sake of profits and with zero regard to the environment.

Re:Why should they?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Less resource use to accomplish the required tasks? Both in manufacturing (more chips from the same amount of manufacturing input) and in operation (less power used)?

Re:Why should they?

[Anonymous Coward]

The kind of quality and efficiency that the summary seems to be talking about is expensive. The buying market wants cheap. Creating cheap solutions means grabbing third-party libraries and gluing them together....as much as possible. Once it basically works you just move on. That keeps development costs low and time to market low, which is exactly what the market wants.

Of course, people might say they want lean and mean, but, when they whip out their wallets they always go for cheap and already-available. So, companies that deliver that defeat companies that spend all their time paying down technical debt and optimizing performance.

So, software bloat is, essentially, the consumer's fault.

Re:Why should they?

[JuliceMTL]

Quick question ... do you always buy the cheapest car possible? I'm pretty sure you don't. This fantasy that consumers always go for the cheapest product is false and blaming consumers for the industry's lazyness and lack of vision is also lazy IMHO. Cheers

Re:Why should they?

[eth1]

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.

Re:Why should they?

[lgw]

There is a big chunk of consumers, probably 20%, that always buy the cheapest possible thing without regard to quality. It's the market Walmart caters to, and I have no problem with businesses that explicitly target "cheap". But that should be a niche, dammit!

Re:Why should they?

[Nidi62]

The kind of quality and efficiency that the summary seems to be talking about is expensive. The buying market wants cheap. Creating cheap solutions means grabbing third-party libraries and gluing them together....as much as possible. Once it basically works you just move on. That keeps development costs low and time to market low, which is exactly what the market wants.

To use the Apple example in the summary, Apple could create lean and efficient software for their phones without raising costs to consumers. But then they would go from making a metric shit ton of profit to only making a standard shit ton of profit and we can't have that, can we? It's not that the people have decided what they want, corporations have told people what they want and the people lapped it up, even when it is quite clearly not in their best interest.

Re:Why should they?

[LucasBC]

Poor software engineering means that very capable computers are no longer capable of running modern, unnecessarily bloated software. This, in turn, leads to people having to replace computers that are otherwise working well, solely for the reason to keep up with software that requires more and more system resources for no tangible benefit. In a nutshell -- sloppy, lazy programming leads to more technology waste. That impacts the environment. I have a unique perspective in this topic. I do web development for a company that does electronics recycling. I have suffered the continued bloat in software in the tools I use (most egregiously, Adobe), and I see the impact of technological waste in the increasing amount of electronics recycling that is occurring. Ironically, I'm working at home today because my computer at the office kept stalling every time I had Photoshop and Illustrator open at the same time. A few years ago that wasn't a problem.

Re:Why should they?

[KixWooder]

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.

Re:Why should they?

[Mark of the North]

Can you really not see the connection between inefficient software and environmental harm? All those computers running code that uses four times as much data, and four times the number crunching, as is reasonable? That excess RAM and storage has to be built as well as powered along with the CPU. Those material and electrical resources have to come from somewhere.

But the calculus changes completely when the software manufacturer hosts the software (or pays for the hosting) for their customers. Our projected AWS bill motivated our management to let me write the sort of efficient code I've been trained to write. After two years of maintaining some pretty horrible legacy code, it is a welcome change.

The big players care a great deal about efficiency when they can't outsource inefficiency to the user's computing resources.

Re:Why should they?

[Locke2005]

No, in about 100 years they'll be mining all of what we now call "garbage dumps". Lot of good raw materials in there, once you know how to deal with the toxins.

Re:Why should they?

[arglebargle_xiv]

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....

Re:Why should they?

[eth1]

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".)

Re:Why should they?

[Bengie]

It was on youtube interviewing him with his recent book. The context was he was talking about the 1% genetic difference between humans are apes(or whatever) and how even the most intelligent of apes are only as smart as a typical 3 year old human. He was saying that we think the laws of the Universe are "hard", but that's hubris because a species 1% different from us may have their 3 year old children being as smart as our smartest physicists, and what's difficult to us may be a simple logic problem to them.

Many problems in life we that call "difficult" are because they require physical effort or lots of knowledge which may be incredible difficult to acquire. But problems of pure reasoning, like many "difficult" aspects of programming, are only relatively difficult to the person(s) claiming it to be, not an inherent fact.

I don't claim to be "smart" as in better at everything, but I do have my strengths. In those strengths, I have solved issues that have stumped entire communities of seasoned professionals for years within seconds of reading of the problem. My guess is most people are like me and we're just not letting people who have intuitive understandings of certain issues to be fully utilized. I've heard of people who can't do basic arithmetic, but are gods at Calculus, but were prevented from even learning Calculus until much later and became recognized as leading physicists in their niche. It was only happenstance that a teacher allowed them to skip remedial math and go into advanced math. There's probably many more out there.

A big problem of intuition is it's nearly impossible to explain and few believe you if they can't understand. Let me explain how you ride a bike. Sit on the seat and start peddling.

Re:Why should they?

[Puls4r]

Inefficient software and environmental harm.

How about pointless software and total environmental harm? I believe they call it "cryptocurrency mining" in more polite circles.

Re:Why should they?

[sjames]

The market only buys cheap because of the years of expensive brands turning out to be rebadged crap. It's to the point where paying more just means you paid more. So the consumers figure if they're likely to get crap either way, they might as well get cheap crap rather than expensive crap.

You can't just pay a bit more for quality because paying a bit more means nothing. You can't actually make something that costs a bit more due to higher quality because nobody will believe that it's actually better or that once you establish a reputation you won't cheap out and stick them with the same old crap in a more expensive box.

It might help somewhat if truth in advertising saw some meaningful enforcement once in a while.

When you're right, you're right.

[pushf popf]

Nobody has a clue anymore whether they're building on a poured concrete foundation or a bag of cats.

Re:When you're right, you're right.

[Arnold Reinhold]

OP should have mentioned a security tax too.

Moore's law

[Anonymous Coward]

When the speed of your processor doubles every two year along with a concurrent doubling of RAM and disk space, then you can get away with bloatware.

Since Moore's law appears to have stalled since at least five years ago, it will be interesting to see if we start to see algorithm research or code optimization techniques coming to the fore again.

Re:Moore's law

[MBGMorden]

I think this will largely be the case.

Think of it in terms of money: if every year you made twice as much money as you did the year before, you'd get to the point where you spent it incredibly recklessly. I'm gonna buy a boat. Is the salesman cheating me? Who cares. I've got the money and I'm getting twice as much next year. Until the flow of money is restricted the spending of it will not be limited.

The same happens with computing resources. We've been getting faster computers with more storage capacity for so long that the people spending those resources (programmers) do so with reckless abandon. Ideally at a minimum the things that everything else relies on - the OS and core libraries - should be EXTENSIVELY optimized to prevent tolerance stacking.

Re:Moore's law

[Anonymous Coward]

The big problem however, is that the software industry isn't even spending it's own money. It's the users resources that they pissing away, and it's the user who gets told that "RAM is cheap", (though it isn't), or "buy a new device".

The problem isn't that capacity grows, it's that the developers doesn't really have to pay for their sloppiness.

Re:Moore's law

[squiggleslash]

That's (mostly) a distinction without a difference. People also talk about a doubling of power, or halving the cost. They're all correct.

Welcome to the world of perpetual growth

[Opportunist]

Perpetual growth also means selling more than last time, and the only way to do that is to make people want your new stuff. This is possible only in two ways: First, your new stuff is so much better than the old one that people WANT it, or second, the old one is already broken so people have to buy it.

Since inventing new stuff that people want badly enough to drop another wad of dough for it even though the old one's still working is hard but making stuff that breaks easily is easy...

Re:Welcome to the world of perpetual growth

[lgw]

Perpetual exponential growth is also know as "technology". And TFA is right on the nose here: technology does not mean "more bling", it means "more efficiency". That's how we sustain perpetual exponential growth. New technologies let us make the same stuff for less labor or energy, a few percent every year.

When the focus changes to all bling, no efficiency, it's a non-sustainable path.

Apple is trying to reverse the trend

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:Apple is trying to reverse the trend

[Anubis IV]

Every now and then Apple does take a step back and work towards making things smaller and faster instead of just newer.

Apple said something during their keynote last week that stuck with me afterwards, mostly because it was so unexpected.

Towards the end of the keynote, they had their VP for environmental and social issues up on stage to talk about how things were going (i.e. the part of the keynote I usually tune out of, since it's rare they ever say anything new). After reiterating that they've now completed the transition to running all of their facilities on 100% renewable energy (i.e. no energy credits), they turned to the topic of what their next initiative will be. Here's the relevant quote (emphasis mine) from that part of the keynote:

We hope to one day eliminate our need to mine new materials from the earth. Now, as you can imagine, this is a massive effort. So, to reach that goal, we have to do three things.

First, we have to find new ways to make our products with recycled or renewable materials that are sourced responsibly. Then we'll have to ensure that our products last as long as possible. And then finally, after a long life of use, we have to ensure that they're recycled properly.

And then about a minute later she expands on that second point:

Second, we also make sure to design and build durable products that last as long as possible. That means long-lasting hardware coupled with our amazing software. All of these devices [images of iPhone 5s through iPhone X displayed on screen], including the iPhone 5s, run iOS 12, and iOS 12 is designed to make your iPhone and iPad experience even better, even more responsive, faster...just better! And because they last longer, you can keep using them, and keeping using them is the best thing for the planet.

To say the least, hearing an executive of a major consumer products company say something that was so blatantly anti-consumerism on a stage caught me by surprise. Here's a major company saying that they want people to NOT buy their products because their customers are using their products for longer instead of buying new ones. And then they backed that statement up by releasing a software update a few days later that improved speeds on all of their oldest still-supported devices. I was skeptical of their claims about iOS 12's improvements, but I've actually become a beneficiary of it, since my iPhone 5s from 2013 is markedly faster with the just-released iOS 12, enough so that I ditched my plans to upgrade this year and instead decided to stick with the 5s for yet another year.

Who fail to learn, re-implement Unix badly.

[Seven Spirals]

Unix solved most of the problems associated with an operating system. It's just that most folks don't take the time to learn their history or look at existing solutions. Instead NIH and "I can do it better" syndrome are the rule. I see this constantly on /. and elsewhere. Folks acting like very old technology is brand new, or acting like something that was invented yesterday isn't a blatant copy of previous tech. Even Window is still trying to catch up to technology that's been in various Unix variants for 20+ years. Unix is the way and the light. Specifically, I think the BSD's have the right mindset. As a nice bonus, the non-graphical installation runs off all the Ubuntites. Yay!

Re:Who fail to learn, re-implement Unix badly.

[Seven Spirals]

So, true. I was lucky. In college (1992-1997) I noticed that the older generations (some, not all of my profs) were so much freakin' smarter than my contemporaries. At first I felt it was unfair. How did they get so smart? Then I started asking them. It turns out there was no such thing as Computer Science until the 1980's. They'd all honed their chops in Electrical Engineering programs and basically had to learn computing from the "bits up". So, while I struggled to learn C and Assembler outside of Java and C++ classes, my peers laughed at me (why couldn't I embrace C++ and Java?) and my professors acted like I was struggling with the fundamentals but some respected my effort, too. Later on as my career gained steam, I realized that my fetish with "old stuff" was paying off huge dividends compared to my peers backgrounds of flavor-of-the-month IT fads and trendy scripting languages. It still is. I still use Unix and C on a daily basis. I write ASM at least once a week, too. I've also got a huge library of actual, real, physical books (*GASP*). I find that they still have information I can't get online. That's especially true for certain programming algorithms and EE firmware programming topics. Some of my expensive EE books have solutions to problems that you simply can't find online at all.

I do!

[ReneR]

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?...

Twice as bad in manufacturing and hard goods.

[Seven Spirals]

Support your state's Right to Repair bill! Part of the reason "everything sucks now" is that we let these fuckers sell us crap that only they can fix.

Can't do it with "Agile"

[david.emery]

I assert that Agile is antithetical for this kind of work. It's critical that infrastructure be built to completion (in both functionality and quality). A lot of infrastructure doesn't lend itself to "requirements on 3x5 cards" For example, how would you handle "consistent concurrent updates" in a distributed system? That's an architectural/key design issue that has substantial repercussions throughout a distributed system.

I've worked on several projects producing on reliable software infrastructure. One was all new code, most others included a lot of COTS. Each had a substantial effort to capture 'architecture' and 'requirements,' including establishing what "100%" looked like so we could track progress to completion, and so the users/customers of of the infrastructure had an idea what features and capabilities they could depend on.

DevOps might work, -if- there's a substantial investment in up front architecture, design, and build planning.

(My sense of "architecture" here includes non-functional considerations, deployment issues, and even identifying human contributions to the system, i.e. how the infrastructure will be configured and maintained.)

Word Processor

[michaelmalak]

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

Vague nostalgia

[sjbe]

Remember times when an OS, apps and all your data fit on a floppy?

Sure do. I also remember that it did close to fuck all in the way of useful tasks compared to the devices I have right now. Is there a point to this nostalgia over what now is primitive technology? If your OS fits on a single disk it is either a VERY narrowly focused device that doesn't do much else or it is a very primitive system that cannot do much. Just because something isn't coded in hand written assembler doesn't mean it is bad.

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.

No they made it DO MORE. It didn't get slower out of incompetence or laziness. (well mostly anyway...) It is a more complicated system that does tasks that weren't previously possible with the older hardware. It's NOT "basically the same" if you really look at it carefully. A lot of new technology has been added which comes at a cost. You could run the old system on the new hardware and it would run faster but do fewer useful things. Pick your poison. I remember running the same DOS system that ran on my 286 on a 486 and it was a whole lot faster but it didn't really take full advantage of that extra speed for most tasks. The code was written the way it was because of the hardware limitations of the day. No different than today.

It just seems that nobody is interested in building quality, fast, efficient, lasting, foundational stuff anymore.

This statement presumes A) that software in the past was all those things (it wasn't) and that B) that the meaning of all those things is clear (it isn't). Define "quality". Define "fast". Define "efficient". And under what context are we talking? That statement makes for a good sound bite but it's as vague as an astrology reading if you really think about it.

Re:Vague nostalgia

[ArchieBunker]

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.

Re:This sounds like my grandpa.

[iggymanz]

very wrong, applications now are built on many bloated layers such that no can understand or secure it.

The massive security holes constantly being found prove it, and the vast majority of those are due to the same mistakes self-confident high IQ morons keep making.

The amount code it takes to do actually a job is much smaller than the size of code we have nowadays, by a factor of at least 10.

it is not "natural", it is laziness, arrogance and ignorance. Each and every security and bug flaw is the fault of that idiotic mindset.

The customer can't find it as an option

[Anonymous Coward]

The customer has no choice in the matter. The people that make the decisions and hire/fire are the ones that do. Lets take a look at a typical DevOps or NoOps shop:

1: The devs are mainly junior to intermediate level. Senior devs get the axe because they cost too much.
2: What matters is getting deliverables that marketing has already sold to a customer.
3: The devs are asked each day about said deliverables in the Scrum stand-up meeting.
4: If the devs don't cough that deliverable up -yesterday-, they get replaced by someone else who can.

In this environment, technological debt is someone else's problem. All that matters is getting stuff working and the code artifacts into production. Security, or readability? That's other people's problems.

This is the modern company. The days of people writing code in assembly to get everything to work perfectly and still have room on a floppy disk are over.

Blame the bad top brass, who short their stock before a security breach is announced so they can swing a new yacht, and who can't hear anything over their own ego. That is where the fault resides.

The best potato peeler in the world:

[hey!]

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.

It's more than that

[rsilvergun]

at least in America. It's not just because they're short sighted, see here or read up some more via google

This is also why 99 cent stores are a harbinger of doom for an economy. They make most of their money selling essentials (toothpaste, soap, toilet paper, etc) in reduced sizes at very high markups to poor people who only have a few dollars left after paying their bills. Me? I buy that stuff at a warehouse store and it saves me about $100 bucks a year vs a grocery store and closer to $300 vs a 99 cent store.

Re:It's more than that

[lgw]

I would hope any self-respecting Slashdotter would understand the "Vimes Boot Theory of Value". However, while there are people forced into that trap by circumstance, there are many more people who simply lack he judgement, ability to plan, or ability to defer gratification. I can't really blame companies for selling to them.

It really pisses me off, however, when there are no middle tier products for some need, just "the cheapest shit possible" and "custom made, massive margin" if you want any quality. Seems like there would be a market for goods in between, the decent quality, moderate margin goods. Perhaps companies get trapped by focusing on growth of sales, rather than profits.

At least as of 2018 that's 78%

[rsilvergun]

living paycheck to paycheck.

There's no middle tier because the middle class has been hollowed out and, well, the middle tier was for them. By "middle class" I don't mean the numeric definition but the more generalized one of a class that has a significant amount of discretionary income.

One thing that's important to realize is that the notion that people are "living beyond their means" is generally a false narrative used by the rich and powerful to keep you and me from questioning the system. There's tons of data to back this up. All the gains since 2008 have gone to the top 1%. Wages stopped growing (and is large swaths declined) in the 70s even as productivity exploded. Essentials like Housing and education are eating up 60+% of peoples income. The commodities market was deregulated resulting in massive food price inflation. For me, I'm going to pay approximately 50% of my income between taxes and healthcare this year and my roads are falling apart, I pay for my kid's school out of pocket and I hesitate to go to the doctor. Meanwhile my country's fighting 8 (count 'em) offensive wars (meaning wars against countries that didn't attack us).

Basically, there's a fall scale class war going on that only one side is fighting...

Re:At least as of 2018 that's 78%

[commodore64_love]

I'm sorry but I used to work at a retail store with lots of people barely getting by. YES a lot of these people would spend money frivilously, like buying new jeans or dresses when they already had a closet FULL of clothes. (How do I know? I just asked.)

Meanwhile I'd keep wearing the same stuff for 10+ years, and only bought new when I had no choice.

- Those people who were my minimum wage coworkers were indeed "living beyond their means" while I was living within my means (and watching my bank account grow). It is a CHOICE of how to live, not a trap.

Frameworks

[bradley13]

Find a modern app that doesn't use 17 different frameworks and external libraries. Each of which ist designed to be general purpose, meaning it does more than the app needs. And each of those external libraries brings in more external dependencies, each of which... How to write "Hello, World" in only 2GB. This is modern software development, and it is seriously insane.