[econ]

You should be able to write something and have it work for the next 1000 years. There is no reason why it can't.

I imagine a simple architecture where each application has its own crappy CPU some memory and some storage with frozen specs. Imagine 1960 and your toaster gains control over your washing machine. Why are they even in the same box?

[scarface_74]

And your needs and technogy doesn’t change in 1000 years?

Does it really make sense in 2025 to use Quicken (?) with a dialup modem that calls into my bank once a day to update my balances like I did in 1996?

Imagine 1960 and your toaster gains control over your washing machine. Why are they even in the same box?

Imagine in 2002 your MP3 Player, your portable TV, your camera, your flashlight, your GPS receiver, your computer you use to browse the web, and your phone being the same device…

[caspper69]

> Does it really make sense to use Quicken (?) with a dialup modem that called into my bank once a day to update my balances like I did in 1996

Well, the modern hot garbage Intuit forces people to use takes 5-15 seconds to save a transaction, 3-5 seconds to mark a transaction as cleared by the bank, it sometimes completely errors out with no useful message and no recourse other than "try again", has random UI glitches such as matched transactions not being removed from the list of transactions to match once matched (wtf?), and is an abject failure at actually matching those transactions without hitting "Find matches", because for whatever reason the software can't seem to figure out that the $2182.77 transaction from the bank matches the only $2182.77 transaction in the ledger. That one really gets my goat, because seriously, WTF guys?

Not to mention the random failure of the interface to show correct totals at random inopportune moments.

Oh, and it costs 5x as much on an annual basis.

I sure would take that 1996 version with some updated aesthetics and a switch to web-based transaction downloading versus the godawful steaming pile of shit we have now- every day of the week and twice on Sunday. Hands down.

This idea that we've made progress is absolutely laughable. Every single interaction is now slower to start, has built-in latency at every step of the process, and is fragile as hell to boot because the interface is running on the framework-du-jour in javascript.

Baby Jesus weeps for the workflows forced upon people nowadays.

I mean seriously, have none of you 20-somethings never used a true native (non-Electron) application before?

[sgarland]

Tbf, RocketMortgage makes Quicken; Intuit makes QuickBooks. Still, I hate the latter with a burning passion, so I’ll indulge that.

What kills me about Intuit is that they _can_ make decent software: TurboTax. Obviously, I’d rather the IRS be like revenue departments in other countries, and just inform me what my taxes were at EOY, but since we live in lobbyist hell, at least Intuit isn’t making the average American deal with QuickBooks-level quality.

It’s not like the non-SaaS version of QB is any better, either. I briefly had a side business doing in-person tech support, and once had a job to build a small Windows server for a business that wanted to host QB internally for use. Due to budget constraints, this wound up being the hellscape that is “your domain controller is also your file server, application server…” Unbeknownst to me at the time, there is/was a long-standing bug with QB where it tries to open ports for its database that are typically reserved by Windows Server’s DNS service, and if it fails to get them, it just refuses to launch, with unhelpful error logs. Even once you’ve overcome that bizarre problem, getting the service to reliably function in multi-user mode is a shitshow.

> I mean seriously, have none of you 20-somethings never used a true native (non-Electron) application before?

Judging on the average web dev’s understanding of acceptable latency, no. It’s always amusing to me to watch when web devs and game devs argue here. “250 msec? That’s 15 screen redraws! What are you doing?!” Or in my personal hell, RDBMS. “The DB is slow!” “The DB executed your query in < 1 msec. Your application spent the other 1999 msec waiting on some other service you’ve somehow wrapped into a transaction.”

[caspper69]

It is my understanding that Dan Gilbert (Detroit businessman, owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers) sold Rock Financial to Intuit who then re-branded it as QuickenLoans.

Gilbert then bought the mortgage unit back from Intuit a few years later, and re-branded it RocketMortgage.

I don't think Rocket has anything to do with Intuit/Quickbooks/TurboTax, with RocketMortgage being in Detroit and Intuit still in California (although I know geography doesn't have anything to do with anything really).

That being said, I fully agree with you 120%. I know desktop QB isn't great (it used to be, especially the DOS-based versions), but the SaaS is a hellhole. It's even worse.

How can businesses literally waste people's time like this? It's a real, quantifiable drain on productivity, with an absolutely insane multiplier based on the number of QuickBooks users. Things that used to take under 30 seconds (marking transactions cleared), now takes a minimum of 5 minutes or more. Ditto for any data entry.

For any bookkeeper, this could be an hour or two of just wasted time, each and every day. Just poof. Why? ARR.

Seriously, f*ck these guys. Asshats.

P.S. on your latency comments; I have something that is very relatable (because I do not think modern developers can relate to a non-programming workflow), modern devs, how would you feel if all of a sudden, every keypress in your IDE now took 3 seconds instead of being (mostly) instantaneous? How about if every time you saved your source file locally you got a spinning icon that took 5-10 seconds? What about if the "cd" command on the cli or the "up dir" or "back dir" button in your file explorer suddenly similarly randomly had a spinning icon for 15 seconds? These tiny delays add up in heavily-used software.

This is the effect your latency has on OTHER PEOPLE'S WORK. Just because you think that random sales, accounting, and clerical staff might not be on your level, doesn't mean they like having their time wasted. It's just absurd that this has become commonplace. If devs had to put up with it, that shit would stop immediately, because then they would feel the pain.

[scarface_74]

The modern way to check your balance is just go to a website, use an app on your phone or just have it show up on your watch.

[caspper69]

None of which handle bookkeeping, which is what Quicken was used for.

I think it should have been obvious from my list of complaints that I was doing something a little more involved than "checking my bank balance".

[scarface_74]

And in that case, you had to call into each bank?

[caspper69]

My rant is about shitty online modern software that replaced fully functional (and fast) software for “reasons”.

I don’t even know what you’re asking.

[brokenmachine]

Solid rant, bravo!

[econ]

The application should not manage the network. It should send out a request and expect it to resolve.

If I write down instructions for a human someone can execute them 1000 years from now.

We build lots of things that just work. Software is not special, if all the bits are still there you can run it.

If your application is made of many chunks of code and data stored in as many different places the bits won't be there surprisingly soon.

Ii can be like a book on a shelve if we want.

[ravetcofx]

you should check out uxntal https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/uxntal.html

https://100r.co/site/computing_and_sustainability.html

[chikere232]

wow, that's an amazingly impossible standard no software lives up to.

Or much technology at all. If you use anything that is 1000 years old, it's probably been maintained or cared for a lot during those 1000 years

[robinsonb5]

Well yeah, 1000 years is obvious hyperbole. But I've been annoyed and frustrated enough by churn over the last two and a half decades that I always ask myself "will this still work in 5 years?" when considering new software - and especially its build process.

It's alarming how often the answer isn't a confident "yes".

[chikere232]

That's fair. Too many languages and frameworks are all too happy to break things for pointless cleanups or renames.

Python for example makes breaking changes in minor releases and seems to think it's fine, even though it's especially bad for a language where you might only find that out runtime

[sgarland]

Python doesn’t follow SemVer. It’s more like “3.{major}.{patch}.” Also, they have deprecation warnings for many, many releases before finally killing something off.

[chikere232]

yeah, it follows their documentation, it's just a bad idea.

A lot of the things they break are pretty minor cleanups and it seems they could easily not have broken things. Many other languages, even compiled languages where the explosions happen at compilation, are much more careful about these things. For a dynamic language like python it's an especially bad idea.