[jjackson5324]

> while real applications have seemingly gotten worse

Can you elaborate on this? I'm not sure I agree.

Modern day applications are doing far, far more than they were 10-15 years ago. Much more traffic, much more data, much more tracking (unfortunately), etc.

[QuadmasterXLII]

Teams is a gigabyte and takes literal minutes to open. Facetime was 14 years ago and did not take literal minutes to open.

(I hate to be the sort of person who exaggerates, so I decided to go through the effort of actually timing Teams for this comment so that I could give it a fair number. I return bearing no such measurement, as today it decided to instantly segfault on open.

    Exception Type:        EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
    Exception Codes:       KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0000000000000008
    Exception Codes:       0x0000000000000001, 0x0000000000000008

    Termination Reason:    Namespace SIGNAL, Code 11 Segmentation fault: 11
    Terminating Process:   exc handler [40516]
)

[hiyer]

That's more a commentary on the inefficiency of Teams rather than software in general. Slack and discord both open pretty much instantaneously, and rarely show up in the top 10 resource consumers on my laptop.

[QuadmasterXLII]

I guess there's 'software' and there's software. The problem is in the larger human system that makes it mandatory for me to run Teams on my laptop- there's a reason I complained about Teams and not my college friend's raytracer project, even though both programs have similar resource consumption and segfault issues.

[whstl]

Performance of software has gotten significantly worse pretty much everywhere. Older computers can't run the things we run today, which is obvious. "Handing more traffic and data" is purely due to the amount of hardware used.

I would also argue that quality has gone down significantly (unless you talk about enterprise apps, where quality was always abysmal) and the cost of making software has also increased, even if we adjust for developer salary. But those are just personal opinions.

[skydhash]

Which is what I like in Apple’s ecosystem. There are still good software there. Things 3, Bear, Paper, Anybox, iA Writer, Reeder, Doppler, Meta (tag editor), Nova, Transmit, Secrets,…

[nottorp]

> Modern day applications are doing far, far more than they were 10-15 years ago. Much more traffic, much more data, much more tracking (unfortunately), etc.

Yes but are you sure the 'more' is in the user's interest?

I'd say 90% isn't. Out of which maybe half is less development cost because you can throw layers upon layers of bloat upon the user, and half is spyware.

[jjackson5324]

No but the company isn't trying to develop software that's best for the user. They're trying to develop software that's best for their bottom line.

[1123581321]

This isn’t what he meant, but my optimistic reading is that the average quality of software has gone down because so many more people can make it. People who would have gotten close but given up now can publish. It does mean a pile of rubble to sift in the marketplace, but so has any advance in creative tools, and many people are scratching their own itches with software and not bothering others with it, which has no downsides.