Note: there is a similar essay on software disenchantment and probably many other similar ones.
Essay: reflections on how software quality has improved/worsened.
Follow-up on http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/computers/high-quality-software/rev2/
Follow-up on “Optimizing Code for Speed” Wikibook
Follow-up on http://perl-begin.org/tutorials/bad-elements/
Follow-up on http://www.shlomifish.org/lecture/C-and-CPP/bad-elements/
Follow-up on FAQ - “This site loads so quickly. What is your secret?”
Freecell Solver speedups ( https://github.com/shlomif/fc-solve/tree/master/fc-solve/benchmarks ), new features ( http://fc-solve.shlomifish.org/features.html ), tests suite, CI, etc.
Cost of code complexity and readability
Learned about CI from https://perlhacks.com/2012/03/you-must-hate-version-control-systems/
Since the essays were written, some apps improved while others got worse.
Electron-based apps:
Software becoming slower and more resource hungry:
Windows Update — slow:
Reportedly still breaks the system sometimes
Gets invoked at inconvenient times
Like at computer shutdown
Red Hat’s dnf
kinda slow
hopefully will improve
Mostly Positive: VLC
Easy to use interface
Popular among many Windows and macOS users.
Mostly Positive: Emscripten / asm.js / WebAssembly
Mostly Positive: pypy
Fast
KDE/Plasma’s update from 3 to 4 was poorly done, and so was 4→5.
Seems like most people except for the KDE core developers do not appreciate the emphasis on the so-called “Activities” instead of on virtual workspaces.
Mostly Positive: cmake
Not perfect but less errorprone and faster than GNU Autotools
Reflections on “Simple” in the context of software:
Simple may imply lacking features or being hard to use.
Hi! Good article. I should note that based on what I wrote here — Prof. Knuth may have been wrong because many small optimisations eventually can add to a significant improvement. Perhaps sometimes an optimisation is not worth it because the program is already fast enough, but I feel that we have accumulated too much junk bloatware recently (see my notes ).
Regarding the “it’s good there is more work for me”, this is the broken window fallacy — and it is also echoed in the “How to become a hacker (not ‘cracker’) howto”. You likely have better things to do than to fix others’ past failures.