14 replies

1. Josh “Yoshi” Vickerson 8 min later

   @zachleat as slop-coded garbage continues to infiltrate every product category, I expect more people will start asking this question.

2. Wheelsbot 18 min later

   @zachleat As always, I blame C++.

3. Axel Rauschmayer 1 hr later

   @zachleat My suspicion: Most programmers like creating new things but not maintaining them (cleaning up small bugs, etc.).

   1. Zach Leatherman 1 hr later

      @rauschma incentives are usually not aligned with maintenance, unfortunately

4. wilander 2 hr later

   @zachleat An academic research topic since at leasts the 1970s. The most profound thing I read about it was about safety and liveness properties of software.
   · Lamport, L. (1977): "Proving the correctness of multiprocess programs"
   · Lamport, L. (1980): "On interprocess communication"
   · Alpern & Schneider (1985): "Defining liveness"

   1. wilander 2 hr later

      @zachleat And that's just on correctness or absence of bugs. Then there's the art of user interfaces. There there's not even formal reasoning available.

5. Ste Grainer 2 hr later

   @zachleat Because senior leadership wants it yesterday, and they want it cheap. 😉

   1. Zach Leatherman 2 hr later

      @stegrainer we need more junior leadership, apparently

6. Private reply 4 hr later
7. Private reply 18 hr later
8. Gaya 18 hr later

   @zachleat because it’s made by humans

9. František Řezáč 2 days later

   @zachleat Because software in this context usually means a highly complex system and as such it needs to fulfill a lot of requirements at once. Only a single purpose thing can be done exceptionaly good. With each additional requirement rises the probability of inevitable trade-offs that make the overal appearance "not good". Note that we often don't realize or acknowledge all the requirements on software that it needs to fulfill because they seem secondary or non-functional.

   1. Vojtěch Svoboda 3 days later

      @calavera @zachleat Isn't this a general truth about everything? 😀

      1. František Řezáč 5 days later

         @vsvob @zachleat Yes, it is, that's what I said, software is no different from other complex systems in this regard.