The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe

https://techtrenches.substack.com/p/the-great-software-quality-collapse

"We've normalized software catastrophes to the point where a Calculator leaking 32GB of RAM barely makes the news."

@buherator Collapse implies that there has been huge drop in software quality. I have not perceived such a thing. We just have gotten better in assessing software quality.

Then again, I've only used computers since 1980s. Maybe the drop in quality happened before that.

@jautero I qouted an example and there are others in the post. Also, not even considering performance, have you ever used MS Teams and thought "hmm, that's some fine piece of software"?

@buherator I'm not saying that modern software is good. I'm saying software has always been bad. The only reason original Mac Calculator didn't leak 32 GB of RAM is that it didn't have 32 GB memory to leak. (Technically Motorola 68000 couldn't even handle that amount of memory.)

Tip: If your software has a watchdog that restarts it because it keeps crashing, you can fix memory leaks by adding module that exits the program if memory consumption gets too big. Two fixes for a price of one!

@buherator Amount of effort put on QA hasn't grown as fast as amount of software, which leads to drop of average quality. You can't show that by picking some worst examples.
You can't write bug free code. You can only find bugs by testing and remove them by debugging. Abstraction layers and AI have the same problem. They add code without adding testing.

@jautero This reminds me that the Sun isn't very hot, there's just lots of it[1] :)

I think this is a reasonable stance. What I do find unreasonable are design choices that (sorry, example again) make people shovel down megabytes of code into a client-side VM to display black on white text. I don't think this would cross anyones mind 20y ago, and not only because perf constraints. But our thinking changed at some point.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tu0mIpX8nU