Hacker News Reader

Comment by scroot | Hacker News Reader

Simplicity and good design take lots of time and money. Our culture is not truly ready to make these kinds of investments in the manner required. Why would they? There is a whole universe of FOSS out there upon which anyone can cheaply create "working" software. If your goals are short term (quarterly earnings, looking only a year or two down the road) this is "good enough." Worse, that FOSS foundation is typically filled to the brim with complexity. We have created a computing culture that is premised on pushing the extremes of the teletype model of computing, and tacking what customers think they want on top of it.

We have good alternate examples from the past (Oberon, Lisp machines, Hypercard, Smalltalk systems, etc). How often does the new generation of computing people get exposed to these ideas?

View on HN

I don't think FOSS is the problem either. I think much complexity is required because everything is expected to live on the web and also/thereby is expected to be client/server. As soon as one wants to do more than just display a document on the web one discovers that its architecture is not very suitable for doing anything else besides displaying a document. A badly formatted document at that..... Also the expectation of client-server communication is a big driver of complexity. As soon as one has that we have network communication, serialization and so on. I.e., stuff that is on the large side of things to write oneself. Of course, with the web one more or less has a client-server architecture by default.

No, FOSS/proprietary is orthogonal to that. You can find simple and performant software. The problem is in something else.

> Worse, that FOSS foundation is typically filled to the brim with complexity.

Really? In my experience, FOSS tends to be a lot simpler and more streamlined than non-free software with comparable functionality.

I agree with 'de_watcher that FOSS/encumbered is an orthogonal axis to complexity/simplicity.

Lots of FOSS software is excessively complex (the systemd ecosystem of shovelware comes immediately to mind) and lots of FOSS is simple. Similarly there are untold thousands of overcomplicated/overengineered proprietary suites and of course it's hard for a graphical application to get simpler than notepad.exe.

And what software developers consider "simplicity and good design" often comes across to other people as "I have no idea what to do and looking at this literally gives me anxiety to the point that I want to avoid it."

> And what software developers consider "simplicity and good design" often comes across to other people as "I have no idea what to do and looking at this literally gives me anxiety to the point that I want to avoid it."

Software UX is a garbage fire [1], but good software UX doesn't necessarily mean building things an untrained user can easily figure out how to use. That's just the orthodoxy we've happened to take with most software, which may also limit its potential. See https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/of-mice-and-men/.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com