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0 pointszenethian1y ago0 comments

Seemingly endlessly layered abstraction is also why phones and computers get faster and faster yet nothing seems to actually run better. Nobody wants to write native software anymore because there are too many variations of hardware and operating systems but everyone wants their apps to run on everything. Thus, we are stuck in abstraction hell.

I'd argue the exact opposite has happened. We have made very little progress because everything is continually abstracted out to the least common denominator, leaving accessibility high but features low. Very few actual groundbreaking leaps have been accomplished with all of this abstraction; we've just made it easier to put dumb software on more devices.

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7 comments · 4 top-level

stouset1y ago· 3 in thread

I encourage you to actually work on a twenty year old piece of technology. It’s easy to forget that modern computers are doing a lot more. Sure, there’s waste. But the expectations from software these days are exponentially greater than what we used to ship.

skydhash1y ago

Winamp was great and there's nothing better now. Office 2003 was feature complete IMO.

stouset1y ago

I can stream almost any song I can conceive of in a matter of seconds from my phone. In doing so I can play it wirelessly across every speaker in my house simultaneously as well as on my TV. The lyrics will be displayed on that TV alongside animated cover art and I can control playback with my remote. I will have other similar music suggested to me automatically when that song is finished playing. Guests at my home can add music to the queue from their phones without any additional setup or intervention on my part.

You don’t have to want to do any of that yourself, but if you can’t concede that that sort of experience would have been utterly inconceivable in the days of Winamp—while being boringly commonplace today—I’m not sure we can have a productive discussion.

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zenethianOP1y ago

I've been a software developer for 25 years, so I'm already there. I really disagree with this though. When I look back at software I was developing 20 years ago in 2005 it is not particularly different than now. It's still client-server, based on web protocols, and uses primarily the same desktop UX. Mobile UX wasn't a thing yet but my whole point was that if we built more apps that were directly native with fewer abstraction layers they would perform better and be able to do more.

Can you give an example of an app that does exponentially more than the same or equivalent app from 2005?

p_l1y ago

Another, huge in fact, reason is that we ask them to do a lot more.

Just the framebuffer for one of my displays uses more memory than a computer that was very usable for all sorts of tasks back in 1998. Rendering UI to it also takes a lot more resources because of that.

skydhash1y ago

> Nobody wants to write native software anymore because there are too many variations of hardware and operating systems but everyone wants their apps to run on everything.

So far we have: Android and i(pad)OS (mobile); MacOS, Windows, *nix? (desktop); And the web. That's not a lot of platform. My theory is that no one want to properly architect their software anymore. It's just too easy to build a ball of mud on top of electron and have a 5GB node_modules folder full of dependencies with unknown provenance.

root_axis1y ago

This is just totally wrong. Full stop. Today's devices are unimaginably orders of magnitude faster than the computers of old. To suggest otherwise is absolutely absurd, either pure ignorance or a denial of reality. I'm quite blown away that people so confidently state something that's so easily demonstrated as incorrect.

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7 comments · 4 top-level

stouset1y ago· 3 in thread

skydhash1y ago

Winamp was great and there's nothing better now. Office 2003 was feature complete IMO.

stouset1y ago

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zenethianOP1y ago

Can you give an example of an app that does exponentially more than the same or equivalent app from 2005?

p_l1y ago

Another, huge in fact, reason is that we ask them to do a lot more.

skydhash1y ago

> Nobody wants to write native software anymore because there are too many variations of hardware and operating systems but everyone wants their apps to run on everything.

root_axis1y ago

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