Hacker News Reader

Comment by ReleaseCandidat | Hacker News Reader

> fully-featured GUI program when today similarly powerful software is orders of magnitude larger in size?

That's because the "fully featured" of the 90s would be barely usable today. Or to rephrase: the frameworks and programs of today are not "similarly powerful" to the ones from the mid 90s, even if you just recompiled the app from 25 years ago with the current version of your framework (theoretically ;), it would gain support for unicode (codepages where just...), internationalization, accessability, support for networks (who still knows Novell?),... . Except for SAP, they somehow succeeded at combining the user-hostileness of the 90's UIs with the resource consumption of contemporary programs ;).

Turbo Pascal had been the language I used after BASIC, with which I started.

View on HN

Joel Armstrong once said "You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle.". That's a very catchy metaphor, although he was talking about C++ style OOP with bloated classes. Still, it feels like it could be generalized to software bloat, rigth?

What you're arguing seems to be "you think you just wanted a banana, but it turns out the customers needed various banana sizes, levels of ripeness, even special alternative hypoallergenic banana breeds, so instead you get a gorilla to fetch you the right banana from the jungle for each situation."

I do think that there is truth to that, but to be honest I think that in an ideal world that would account for some these orders of magnitude, but leave out the majority of them. It is really, really easy to underestimate just how much faster and bigger computers have gotten in the last thirty years.

What I find a more compelling argument for the majority of this increase in software size and CPU usages is that letting the software bloat and slow down the level that the customers tolerate is a form of externalizing costs for developers. A lot of developer convenience comes at the cost of the end-user, imo. And even if the developers care, then the companies that employ them don't mind saving money that way.

> That's because the "fully featured" of the 90s would be barely usable today.

Saying that in a thread about TurboPascal is strange. I mean notepad needs about 5 seconds to start on my windows 10 work computer. And the usability of windows 10 is ... not.

Yeah, if one is talking about user-hostile UI, Turbo Vision apps are not, certainly not compared to some of today's stuff.

Yes, there's more functionality. But not orders of magnitude more. The bloat of modern software is incredible.

Depends on what you mean for SAP. Reports at least are super easy to write and have better usability than other in-house stuff I saw. UI5 now has components that you can use with React, which give the web experience. SAP GUI is kind of okay, and fast. What do you mean?

probably core ABAP development in some module.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com