Hacker News
points by CM30 2 days ago | 0 comments
I think one look at video games throughout history should probably shoot down the idea that software is uniquely bad nowadays compared to how it was in the past. The Atari era had enough poorly made games that the industry basically crashed in North America, and its revival in the 8-bit era didn't really change as much as expected. The fact the internet is full of YouTube reviewers akin to the Angry Video Game Nerd should be evidence that incredibly bad, often blatantly non functional software was a common occurrence throughout history.

There were games released in a pre-alpha state (Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing), games that were basically released in a normal alpha state (Superman 64, Action52, etc) and there were games which literally didn't work because of major programming issues (SQIJ! had a player character which couldn't move due to the game only looking for lower case inputs while leaving the caps lock on).

And that's only the most extreme examples. Plenty of games had broken features and mechanics, or were outright impossible to complete due to poor level design and a lack of proper testing. Fan games, mods, ROM hacks and indie game scenes from the earlier days were just as notorious for works that were barely functional.

Generally games are at least now functional nowadays, with even the worst tending not to outright crash to a black screen or leave you with a player character that's completely unable to move. In many ways, the baseline level of competence arguably seems to be getting higher, with the march of AI meaning the worst is probably better than it might have been previously been.

Outside of games, it's worth noting how deeply insecure and flawed many older websites and programs were. There was a time where storing passwords in plain text was more of a norm, where input validation and sanitisation was often forgotten about, and where sites getting hacked was just as common an occurrence as today. Many Perl devs probably recoil in horror after hearing the term "Matt's Script Archive".

Are some things worse? Sure, performance seems to have become increasingly ignored in recent years, with web page sizes getting incredibly bloated and latency going through the roof. In some places there's more bad software overall, since the ability to vibe code it means non-programmers are building software more than ever. And some big companies that used to be respectable have let standards slip a lot (see Epic Games, Microsoft, etc).

Sturgeon's Law/Revelation held back then, and still holds today: 90% of everything is crap.

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