Arne Brasseur8h ago

It's clear that AI assisted coding is dividing developers (welcome to the culture wars!). I've seen a few blog posts now that talk about how some people just "love the craft", "delight in making something just right, like knitting", etc, as opposed to people who just "want to make it work". As if that explains the divide.

How about this, some people resent the notion of being a babysitter to a stochastic token machine, hastening their own cognitive decline. Some people resent paying rent to a handful of US companies, all coming directly out of the TESCREAL human extinction cult, to be able to write software. Some people resent the "worse is better" steady decline of software quality over the past two decades, now supercharged. Some people resent that the hegemonic computing ecosystem is entirely shaped by the logic of venture capital. Some people hate that the digital commons is walled off and sold back to us. Oh and I guess some people also don't like the thought of making coding several orders of magnitude more energy intensive during a climate emergency.

But sure, no, it's really because we mourn the loss of our hobby.

Show threadHans Hübner8h ago

@plexus In the end, software engineering is about creating solutions to problems other people have. The solutions are not a byproduct, but the primary purpose. To the majority of users, the inner workings and the creation process of software is opaque. The qualities that software exposes on the outside are largely independent of its inner workings.

This means that for most people in the software industry, adapting to the new tooling that makes the creation process more efficient is 1/

Show threadJavier Pérez7h ago
@hanshuebner @plexus
"The qualities that software exposes on the outside are largely independent of its inner workings." Sorry, but this can't be further away form truth. Our 70+ years pile of empirical evidence says otherwise. The whole history of software engineering is about how to manage and improve internal quality in order to result in good external quality.
Show threadHans Hübner7h ago

@flooper @plexus You can certainly define "quality" so that what you wrote is true. I know of enough "successful" software that was "successful" without having "good quality" on the inside. "Success" is something that many people would associate with "quality", so there you have the definition that I was talking about.

I believe that disussions around quality that don't consider users is worthless. The connection between external and internal quality less tight than some make it appear.

Show threadArne Brasseur7h ago
@hanshuebner @flooper I explicitly called out Worse is Better, which is exactly what you are talking about. The original formulation was that Unix "won" because it was "worse", it was simpler, easier to port, etc. That whole dogma has morphed over time. During the SaaS boom worse-is-better meant ship MVPs to capture market and lock in users. Now that we're in the enshittify stage it means "drop quality and raise prices as much as the user will bear before churning", enabled by platform lock in. So yes, for some capitalist notion this is winning, it's certainly extracting value. It's a notion I wholeheartedly reject.
Show threadHans Hübner6h ago

@plexus @flooper "Worse is better" is not a dogma, it is a thesis and an interpretation of history, which can be read in different ways. It was originally frame in the context of Unix and how it was worse than other systems. These other systems were, e.g. Multics, VAX/VMS, VM/370 or Genera, and much of the resent of the applauding audience came from habit, arrogance and hubris.

In that context, it can also be argued that Unix was better than these other systems, strictly because of its 1/

Show threadSvante

@hanshuebner @plexus @flooper

Yes, »worse is better« morphed from /description/ to /prescription/. (There is a nice talk by Romeu Moura about this fallacy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92Pq4-e0QyI)

In short: people erroneously move from »it's like this« to »it should be like this« or »it's inevitable like this«, and then enshrine it as a given fact, assumption or axiom instead of asking what can be done about it.

Why do hotel bathrooms lack toothpaste - Romeu Moura - DDD Europe 2019

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