Jonathan Blow on Societal Collapse (2019)

Re:Jonathan Blow on Societal Collapse (2019) by agentultra on Friday August 26, 2022 @09:40PM (#32614723)

I don’t know if there’s ever been a comprehensive survey on the subject. But it does seem like a rare skill some times. And it’s not like we’re lacking examples of bloated, slow, and error prone software these days.

Is it getting worse? I don’t know. My impression has been that it’s a marvel it works so well when it sometimes seems like the whole enterprise is too complicated to work at all.

But maybe we have simply been conditioned to not want better. Errors are fine, leaking memory happens, security vulnerabilities are inevitable. What can you do?

Is it worse than it was 20 years ago? I don’t know. I’m not much younger than Blow and grew up programming on an Amiga. I do enjoy fond memories of programming a machine that I had a manual for and knew well. It is very different today… but also much easier and more inclusive of folks with different skill levels.

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Re:Jonathan Blow on Societal Collapse (2019) by Rebelgecko on Friday August 26, 2022 @09:50PM (#32614789)

I don't know if we should necessarily use slow/buggy software as examples. IMO it's very conceivable that it's written by devs who know better, but they're not optimizing for those metrics. I've certainly been in situations where I've thought "well, I can reduce latency here by 100ms, but is that worth delaying the project by 2 days?"

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