[tilne]

> But perhaps most importantly, debuggers are an intricate piece of the puzzle of the design of a development platform—a future I become more interested in every day, given the undeniable decay infecting modern computing devices and their software ecosystems.

I agree with this sentiment, yet still I’m wondering if it’s fully justified. There has never been more bad software than right now, but there has never been more good software either, no?

It’s not super relevant to the main contents of the article. Just a bit that caught my attention with regards to how it made me think.

[nyarlathotep_]

I think there's two 'poles' here--'good' in terms of feature rich, sure, there's loads of it.

'good' as in performant--an area that game dev types (rightly, IMO) criticize and harp on? There's far less of it, video games aside.

Think of the perceivable slowness of many web application you use daily, Windows 11's, well, everything UI-related, etc.

Hell, my 3 year old iPhone can't scroll Uber Eats at 60fps consistently. Is 'Uber eats' 'good'? From a functionality standpoint, yeah, of course. But is displaying a list of images and text and expecting it to scroll smoothly too much to ask?

Software can be 'good' in terms of functionality offered and 'bad' at the same time, depending on your perspective.

IIRC I think Mr Fleury has a background in game-dev, so his perspective is totally understandable. Modern games are remarkable feats of software.

[chillfox]

Games are not immune to bad code.

Many gamers are unhappy with the performance of modern games as fewer and fewer of them can manage 60 fps at release on even high-end hardware.

[indy]

Thinking selfishly, the absolute quantity of good/bad software isn't as important as the software you have to interact with on a day-to-day basis. Good software is invisible and under-appreciated, you use it for it's purpose and move on, bad software really sticks out.

[tilne]

Good point. The amount of bad software I’m forced to interact with regularly has gone up, mostly because there’s so many systems cobbled together in workflows now.

[dahart]

It’s a good question, what exactly is this decay and why is it called undeniable? Is that even true? If I think back on what programming was like thirty years ago up through today, everything about computing has steadily improved, gotten easier, more reliable, and higher quality, on average. All operating systems crash a lot less often than they used to. Computing devices from desktops & laptops, to phones, to routers & NASes, to household appliances, have all become faster, better, cheaper, and have more features and higher utility.

There are some ways I could see the author being somewhat justified, especially when it comes to the need for debuggers. Software is getting more layers. The amount of it and the complexity of it is going up. Debuggers are super useful for helping me understand the libraries I use that I didn’t write, and how my own code interacts with them. There are also a lot more people writing code than there used to be, and because the number of people writing code has been growing, that means the distribution skews toward beginners. I feel like the number of languages in popular use is also going up, and the diversity of coding environments increasing. I don’t know that I would frame all this as ‘decay’ but it does mean that we’re exposed to higher volumes of iffy code and abstractions over time.

[jxjnskkzxxhx]

> there has never been more good software

Right. It's incredible that something like Linux is free. For a more recent example, look at Vs code. An even more recent example, look at how many open weight llms there are out there.

[bigstrat2003]

I definitely would not call VS Code good software, at least not overall. It's good in that it's not buggy, but it uses an absurdly high amount of system resources without any actual benefit. It is not ok that just to open a handful of small text files, it uses 1-2 GB of memory.

[jxjnskkzxxhx]

Memory used is not the only metric by which to evaluate software.

My machine has enough ram that this doesn't matter to me, and Vs code allows to be very productive compared eg to vim.

[tilne]

Yeah vs code was one of the first examples I thought of as well. It has its own set of issues for sure, but even as a former vim fanatic it’s amazing from both a default experience perspective and that of a power user.

[jesse__]

> For a more recent example, look at Vs code

HA! Comparing VSCode to Linux is like comparing an overweight, acne-ridden drug addict that lives in his mom's basement to an astronaut with 3 PhDs. They're barely even the same species.