Where the fuck did we go so wrong with modern software? (Tantrum)

[Jack O'Neill]

I wanted to make a thread regarding the complete fucking shit known as modern software, and I also want to hear your thoughts about this shit-show as well. I am very sure you have a lot to say about it.

Now then, where to fucking start? I'll start with browsers, and internet infrastructure/technology

Browsers:
Web browsers today, are some of the largest piles of crap known to man. They are slow, bloated, buggy, and have some god-awful memory management (also a shit load security issues).
For example: Firefox consuming over 300 fucking megabytes of ram for displaying a simple google page, and 500-700 on most browsers that use shitty Chromium for rendering web pages.
I am no web developer expert, however, a web browser is simply an interpreter for reading and correctly displaying web content(?). For some fucking reason, browser developers can't get that fucking right. Why do they need to consume so much memory in the first place?

Internet infrastructure:
One thing I can not stand about the internet, is how much control corporate cunts have over it. They define what the web is, and they infect it with their shitty ideas.

Visual studio:
I have to use this pile of shit at work. It is buggy, slow, and crashes at every chance it gets. And one thing that astounds me, is that displaying the menus at the top of the program take too long to load. Why the fuck is that the case? Sometimes, while writing code VS will simply delete elements of code for some reason. Like, what the actual fuck?

We have incredibly powerful computers, yet modern software runs like absolute shit! Are computers today encouraging lazy software development? Imagine how lovely it would be if developers took the time to optimize their shit!

Videos that can explain my issues with software way better than I ever could:

This is just a shitty little rant, and I needed to get some things off my chest. I would LOVE to hear what you niggers have to say about modern software. I know you have plenty much to say.

 

[REGENDarySumanai]

Indian programmers can't code worth shit, news at 11.

 

[Dick Justice]

welcome to surveillance capitalism, the future you chose with every google search and twitter shitpost

 

[Coffee Shits]

The tools are too forgiving and the money is too good.

 

[Glad I couldn't help]

Web browsers today, are some of the largest piles of crap known to man. They are slow, bloated, buggy, and have some god-awful memory management (also a shit load security issues).
For example: Firefox consuming over 300 fucking megabytes of ram for displaying a simple google page, and 500-700 on most browsers that use shitty Chromium for rendering web pages.
I am no web developer expert, however, a web browser is simply an interpreter for reading and correctly displaying web content(?). For some fucking reason, browser developers can't get that fucking right. Why do they need to consume so much memory in the first place?

Somebody counted all the words in the W3C specifications, and found that it was larger than the combined word counts for the C, C++, POSIX, UEFI, USB specifications, as well as all the RFCs.

 

[spiritofamermaid]

I despise the modern minimalism style. I used to know the word/what it was called, but forgot. It's why all the squares are beveled, giving it that modern "mobile" look, where you have NO idea of what you are able to click on beyond an almost invisible drop shadow.

Especially when Photoshop 2019 redid their entire UI and everyone hated it. STOP MAKING THINGS LOOK ALL "MODERN" AND CUTESY FOR PETE'S SAKE.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk

Edit: I remember what it was called! It's called Material Design. Despise it. Also lol, didn't notice that Safir replied to me and told me. Thanks!

 

[MookBong]

Women won't suck my pp for coding so why make something that isn't a buggy pile of shit?

 

[Safir]

I despise the modern minimalism style. I used to know the word/what it was called, but forgot. It's why all the squares are beveled, giving it that modern "mobile" look, where you have NO idea of what you are able to click on beyond an almost invisible drop shadow.

Material Design.

 

[Sgt. Pinback]

...Especially when Photoshop 2019 redid their entire UI and everyone hated it...

lolwut - they seriously did that? Can you switch it back to 'Classic Mode' or something?

That's surely gonna fuck with so many designers' workflows, having to get used to a new UI, especially on an app that's as complex and multilayered with years of cruft like PS.

Now would be a good time to get your head around GIMP or whatever, if you've got to learn a whole other UI/workflow anyway.

 

[Robert James]

See everyone's going after the poointheloos but the real answer, is HR and Marketing. It's what happens when you let people who have no idea how coding works to hire the people writing your software. Marketing is to blame for a lot of the bloated features and unnecessary additions, they'll usually use some excuse about differentiating between products or how certain features on unrelated software do so well so we should add it to ours.

We're here because we created worthless jobs then let the idiots in said worthless jobs have a say in our companies.

 

[sasazuka]

Not being able to run my ancient CD-ROM copies of Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Word with eternal licenses on any Windows past XP (without setting up a Virtual Machine, something which I don't think is happening on this underpowered HP laptop from 2013) and not being able to buy Photoshop with an eternal license even if I wanted to anymore. (Not so sure about Word, can you still buy Word with an eternal license? Not that it matters all that much to me as I just use Apache Open Office Writer for Word documents now.)

I still have a license that works for Photoshop on my Mac from the college I was attending although I suspect that's going away soon as I'm not going to enroll again until there's a vaccine, but, while I do use Gimphoto (GIMP with a Photoshop-like interface) on my HP, there are some things that are much easier to do in Photoshop.

 

[Kosher Dill]

I am no web developer expert, however, a web browser is simply an interpreter for reading and correctly displaying web content(?).

That's exactly the problem, it hasn't been that for a long time. Now browsers are practically miniature operating systems - just look at this long discussion of task queues and event loops in the HTML5 spec.

https://www.w3.org/TR/html52/webappapis.html#event-loops

A general-purpose browser not only has to render HTML (and make it accessible to scripting via DOM), but it has to have an implementation of Javascript, this whole task-scheduling model, and a million other things.
And then into this little operating system you're loading untrustworthy code from the internet and running it, and trying to keep the end user safe. It's a losing battle and always has been.

EDIT:

Not so sure about Word, can you still buy Word with an eternal license?

Yes, you can still buy all of Office with a perpetual license, and I highly recommend people do this while it's still possible.
I was prescient enough to snag a perpetual license to Photoshop CS6 while it was still available and I feel smarter for that every day.

 

[Harvey Danger]

I've been giving this rant in other places for the last 3 years, and if I try to answer completely I'll lose my mind. I need my mind for work on Monday. So I'm going to drink instead.

I'll give you a hint, though: the common culprit across all software types is off-the-shelf libraries. We've always known that abstraction and delegation to libraries carry hidden performance, maintenance, and debugging costs. The benefit is reduced development time. In an ideal development project, you balance the two and figure out when you need to roll your own.

Now imagine a world where every single time that decision comes up, your manager opts for reduced development time. For every feature, component, even subroutine: get a library, configure it, stack dependency on top of dependency on top of dependency, each with their own "only a few megabytes" loaded into memory, their own "only a few milliseconds" init time.

Iterate that over 15 years, and you get modern software. It's dependencies all the way down. It's why all the major apps on iOS crashed yesterday because they include the Facebook SDK, even when they made no calls to it, even when they commented out the code referencing it.

The browser thing is the same problem plus an industry-wide abuse of Javascript. Tell a modern web developer to make a website without Node, React, ActiveJS, AngularJS, Bootstrap, Backbone, jQuery, Cascade, common-js, QueueJS, JSON, AtomJS, ModuleJS, Knockout, Cycle, etc. They'll stare at you blankly. They can't do it. They'll snivel and whine in front of their IDE until you approve at least 3 of those.

Your browser rendering a "simple google page" isn't just displaying 1k worth of HTML, it has to load JS libraries and execute more code than the original Apollo spacecraft did.

And now I really am going to go find that drink.

 

[Ahriman]

I am starting to agree more and more with Linus Torvalds, it's a rather similar thing in the Linux world.

 

[Jack O'Neill]

am starting to agree more and more with Linus Torvalds, it's a rather similar thing in the Linux world.

Regarding linux, I have been trying to move to it for a long time, sadly, it's fractured ecosystem, and it's terrible debugging tools, such as GDB is whats preventing me from doing so.

 

[Ahriman]

Regarding linux, I have been trying to move to it for a long time, Sadly, it's fractured ecosystem, and it's terrible debugging tools, such as GDB is whats preventing me from doing so.

As long as you stick to Debian or Fedora (that's what Linus uses) you should be fine. If you want something that's more "plug-and-play", Linux Mint is quite comfy these days. Arch and its cousin Manjaro are nice but then you need to be more a bit more savvy and are unreliable as they are unforgiving, mostly Arch-- installing an update could bork your system and it's a major pain in the ass to get it working again. Not because it's hard, their documentation is really good, but it's inconvenient.

For instance, I run Linux Mint on my workstation because I treat it as a tool, nothing more. So I need things to work and don't have time to be troubleshooting things on my local environment, and it's served me well so far.

 

[Jack O'Neill]

As long as you stick to Debian or Fedora (that's what Linus uses) you should be fine. If you want something that's more "plug-and-play", Linux Mint is quite comfy these days. Arch and its cousin Manjaro are nice but then you need to be more a bit more savvy and are unreliable as they are unforgiving, mostly Arch-- installing an update could bork your system and it's a major pain in the ass to get it working again. Not because it's hard, their documentation is really good, but it's inconvenient.

For instance, I run Linux Mint on my workstation because I treat it as a tool, nothing more. So I need things to work and don't have time to be troubleshooting things on my local environment, and it's served me well so far.

I will keep that in mind. I use a lot of software that will not work with linux and trying to run them with wine is a mixed bag. I would use open-source alternatives, but most of them are not very good, and are quite buggy and unreliable.

 

[emo goff]

I have like 8 tabs open and somehow this requires 2 GIGABYTES of ram. Why???
They are like 7 tabs mostly text and 1 youtube tab.

 

[cjöcker]

Browsers don't translate HTML into stuff readable by a human, they just display JavaScript apps.

 

[Pissmaster]

Not being able to run my ancient CD-ROM copies of Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Word with eternal licenses on any Windows past XP (without setting up a Virtual Machine, something which I don't think is happening on this underpowered HP laptop from 2013) and not being able to buy Photoshop with an eternal license even if I wanted to anymore. (Not so sure about Word, can you still buy Word with an eternal license? Not that it matters all that much to me as I just use Apache Open Office Writer for Word documents now.)

I still have a license that works for Photoshop on my Mac from the college I was attending although I suspect that's going away soon as I'm not going to enroll again until there's a vaccine, but, while I do use Gimphoto (GIMP with a Photoshop-like interface) on my HP, there are some things that are much easier to do in Photoshop.

This post is the embodiment of why I openly advocate software piracy. If the product you can pay for is inferior to the product you can pirate, you should always pirate. Same goes for anything with unreasonable copy protection, malware, licensing restrictions, or malicious mandatory updates.

In cases like with subscription-based services, you can consider your content subsidized. Unused subscriptions are a billion-dollar industry.