[Py-MAD] Sobre el bloatware

[Jesus Cea]

La reflexión me parece perfecta y la mando aunque sea algo offtopic
porque me parece de valor:

https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=15887404&cid=59789568

"""
I should probably clarify what I'm talking about.

Writing terrible code is only marginally related to hardware
performance. Sure, it helped it to flourish back when the modern
mainstream software development culture was being founded, but if
hardware stopped getting better today we would continue to see terrible,
bloated software everywhere.

The biggest reason for terrible software is our software business
culture. Software developers have to keep moving forward as quickly as
possible in the short term both because that's the business culture and
because software that gets out first tends to succeed regardless of how
shitty it is (at least as long as it's not totally unusable). Once a
piece of software has "won" market share in some space, it can get by
with far less effort, only losing out after years to decades of terrible
decisions and only if something consistently good is waiting in the
wings to take its place. It additionally puts the business with the
shitty but fast-to-market software in a position where it can root out
competition while the competition is still weak, further strengthening
its position. Thus, getting software to market fast has to take top
priority for any successful business, and our software development
culture has grown up around this primary force.

Bloat in particular is an easy quality hit to accept for development
speed, since it tends to have less of a negative impact on adoption than
other quality issues.

On top of that, the costs of bloat has almost always been paid by a
someone other than the party developing the software. With boxed
software, the person buying the software pays the costs of bloat, not
the person developing the software and making the sale. With cloud
software, the person using the software online is paying for the
client-side of bloat, which is often where most of the bloat is as a
result of these forces.

Still, as long as the software is "good enough" and the bloat isn't so
extreme as to make the software no longer "good enough", then bloat will
not dissuade most consumers, and so it will continue, and our business
culture will continue to amplify this problem.

Also, we're never going to reach an "end" to software development and
finally have perfect software to put in place and call it a day. In
addition to the constant changes to business requirements, software goes
through cycles of fashion, leading to a never-ending treadmill of
change. In addition to the internal fashion cycles that are likely more
obvious to software developers (which could arguably be ended one day if
the perfect solution came along), there's external fashion cycles driven
by users (and designers). A piece of user-facing software that still
works perfectly well can be seriously hurt by not keeping up with these
external fashion cycles for long enough.

(Side note: assuming there is a perfect endpoint to software
development, it would make this whole discussion irrelevant, since we'd
be done with development once we wrote the perfect software and wouldn't
have to go back and work on the perfect software. Diving into the
perfect code would just be an intellectual exercise from there on out.)

As long as there's no end to software development, then we'll continue
to see speed-to-market win out over quality. Even when things have
topped out, those who can chase fashion trends the best will tend to be
the most successful. After all, this is true for other mature
technologies as well (clothing technology hasn't radically changed in
decades and keeping ourselves clothed is trivial, yet people continue to
spend money on new trendy clothing) except when regulation forces a
higher level of quality (cars are not immune to fashion trends either,
though the safety aspects of cars require them to conform more tightly
around the current optimum).

It also doesn't help that there are so many people working in IT and
development that probably shouldn't be there in the first place. It's
relatively well paying work and there's staggering demand for
developers, so many people are only there for the money, not for the
love of the craft. Those of you who pine for the good ol' days are
really pining for the days when most of the people working in the field
were there for the love of the craft.

That said, there may be some hope for the future of software, but things
aren't magically going to be fixed just because hardware stopped improving.
"""

-- 
Jesús Cea Avión                         _/_/      _/_/_/        _/_/_/
jcea at jcea.es - https://www.jcea.es/    _/_/    _/_/  _/_/    _/_/  _/_/
Twitter: @jcea                        _/_/    _/_/          _/_/_/_/_/
jabber / xmpp:jcea at jabber.org  _/_/  _/_/    _/_/          _/_/  _/_/
"Things are not so easy"      _/_/  _/_/    _/_/  _/_/    _/_/  _/_/
"My name is Dump, Core Dump"   _/_/_/        _/_/_/      _/_/  _/_/
"El amor es poner tu felicidad en la felicidad de otro" - Leibniz

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