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Comment by Ygg2 | Hacker News Reader

> When and why has "stable" become synonymous with "unmaintained"?

Because the software ecosystem is not static.

People want your software to have more features, be more secure, and be more performant. So you and every one of your competitors are on an update treadmill. If you ARE standing (aka being stable) on the treadmill, you'll fall off.

If you are on the treadmill you are accumulating code, features, and bug fixes, until you either get too big to maintain or a faster competitor emerges, and people flock to it.

Solving this is just as easy as proving all your code is exactly as people wanted AND making sure people don't want anything more ever.

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> People want your software to have more features, have fewer bugs, and not be exploited. So you and every one of your competitors are on an update treadmill. If you ARE stable, you'll probably fall off. If you are on the treadmill you are accumulating code, features, bug fixes, until you either get off or a faster competitor emerges.

Runners on treadmills don't actually move forward.

Kinda the point of the threadmill metaphor. If you are standing on a threadmill, you will fall right off. It requires great effort to just stay at one spot.

But adding features isn't staying at the same spot.

Honestly. I think it is. All software exists in a kind of attract consumer/developer evolutionary race.

If I assume your point is true, wouldn't everyone then just switch to Paint for all 2D picture editing? I mean it's the fastest - opens instantly on my machine vs 3-4sec for Krita/Gimp/Photoshop. But it's also bare bones. So why isn't Paint universal used by everyone?

My assumption: what people want is to not waste their time. If a program is 3 seconds slower to start/edit, but saves you 45 minutes of fucking around in a less featureful editor, it's obvious which one is more expedient in the long run.

I use paint, because it starts fast so I don't waste my time. When I want complex edit, I use paint.net - because it does everything yet starts million times faster than Krita/Gimp/Photoshop. In fact paint.net 3 already had all the features in 2008, after that it was vapid churn, it's literally impossible to notice the difference.

> When I want complex edit, I use paint.net

That's kind of my point. Even you eschew Paint's simplicity when you need a more complex transformation. Nothing you do in Paint.Net isn't impossible in Paint, given enough calculation and preparation. So a performance isn't the deciding factor. It's the speed of achieving thing X (of which startup/lag is a tiny cost).

Similarly in Paint.Net you could emulate many Photoshop features (e.g., non-destructive editing), but doing so would be tedious (duplicate layer, hide layer adjust copy layer, then edit until you get it to where you want it).

Performance is a deciding factor, it's the reason I use paint and don't use Krita/Gimp/Photoshop. I use Ctrl+Z for non-destructive editing in paint. Also paint has a more reliable and predictable UI, you never know what those overly smart editors will do. Will they add too much antialiasing? Randomly switch to subpixel precision? Insert transparent background (antialiased)?

> Performance is a deciding factor

There are two things in play: just because it's a deciding factor for you doesn't mean it's a deciding factor for everyone else. Second, even for you, Paint isn't enough. You also got Paint.net. You can reproduce almost any effect in PS or Gimp or Krita in Paint/Imagemagick. Why not just use those two for everything.

It's the same thing as using an IDE vs notepad(++). Anything done in the IDE behemoth can be done in notepad. Albeit at a significant time penalty, and with way more CLI jousting.

> I use Ctrl+Z for non-destructive editing in paint

That's not really non-destructive editing - that's Undo. A non-destructive editing means you can edit, change things, save, close the program. Reopen file after X days amount of time, and change effect or thing you applied.

Could be, if you're attracting some users who wanted the new stuff and pushing out other customers who just wanted fast and stable.

I guess if the same spot refers to marketshare

> People want your software to have more features, be more secure, and be more performant

I think it's worth noting that one reason hardware rots is because software seems to become slower and slower while still doing the same thing it did 15 years ago.

> still doing the same thing

The core issue, in my humble opinion, is that it's not doing the same thing. But from a thousand miles away it looks like that, because everyone uses 20% of functionality, but everyone in aggregate uses 100% of functionality.

> I think it's worth noting that one reason hardware rots is because software seems to become slower and slower while still doing the same thing it did 15 years ago.

I'd like to see some actual proof of (/thoughts on) this. Like if you didn't patch any security issues/bugs, or add any features, or fixed any dependencies, how is the code getting slower?

Like I understand some people care about performance, but I've seen many non-performant solutions (from Unity, to Photoshop to Rider, being prefered over custom C# engine, Paint, Notepad++) being used nearly universally, which leads me to believe there is more than one value in play.

Well Slack may have a few more features over IRC but none of them should cause my laptop fans to start spinning. Many of the slowdowns in modern web are because of trackers. Software may be more efficient but all that is neglected by software trying to do more. But so much of that "more" isn't resulting in more features for the user.

And yes convenience, social adoption and flashy modern appearance are major factors in the decision making. Whether it contributes to obsolescence or is fast isn't a factor at all.

> Well Slack may have a few more features over IRC but none of them should cause my laptop fans to start spinning. Many of the slowdowns in modern web are because of trackers. Software may be more efficient but all that is neglected by software trying to do more. But so much of that "more" isn't resulting in more features for the user.

It's literally Electron based. Trackers are a rounding error in the ocean that is Chrome + Node.

Got one idling in memory on my Intel mac rn. Let's see. 341 MB or Slack renderer, 198 MB of Slack Helper GPU, 72 MB for Slack itself + 50MB for Slack Helper stuff. Literally eating 661 MB of memory doing practically nothing. Which means a huge web tracker (circa 10MB) is 1.5% of that.

Electron itself is the culprit, more than any tracker. And reason Electron is used is that: HTML/CSS/JS is the only cross platform GUI that looks similar on all platforms, has enough docs/tutorials, and has enough of frontend developers available.

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