It's surprising how different the standards are between software engineering and all other kinds of engineering, for instance civil or mechanic.

The old joke was "If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization", but in the AI era it feels like a butterfly would be enough.

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anonym29 an hour ago | parent [-]

Counterpoint: if programmers wrote programs the way structural engineers designed buildings, ecommerce apps would take half a decade to build and the software industry would have just gotten around to inventing Windows Vista and jQuery in the last year or so.

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birdsongs an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe that's okay.

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swatcoder an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you're saying e-commerce would simply be consistent and secure product catalogs with fewer promotional and tracking dark patterns, web scripting would rely on a and extensible and functional library for manipulating markup documents, and a stable OS kernel with few dark patterns and no cloud accounts, many of us would be sold in a heartbeat.

I don't think you're making the counterpoint you mean to be.

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anonym29 31 minutes ago | parent [-]

Don't be naïve - the industry wouldn't be any less laden with surveillance crapitalism; the presence of that isn't a product of the pace of development, it is a product of the nature of consumers to eagerly suffer limitless abuse so long as the product "just werks", looks/feels polished, and doesn't require any kind of learning or discomfort.

Freedom from everything you enumerated already exists for anyone who cares enough to pursue it - robust ad and script blockers, operating systems with no coercion or user hostility, simple and stable scripting languages. They're not as polished as the products of manipulative and extractive abusers like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Discord, et al., and accordingly, users shun them, for the reason I explained above.

	▲	birdsongs 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> it is a product of the nature of consumers to eagerly suffer limitless abuse Ah, there's the victim blaming. > Freedom from everything you enumerated already exists for anyone who cares enough to pursue it Do you have any idea how daily life is for non-technical people? It isn't reasonable in our society to expect everyone to switch to FOSS, and blaming 60 year olds for getting their identity stolen because they weren't using a Linux phone or rolling their own self hosted matrix chat server is such a cruel and unbelievably out of touch take.

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dawnerd an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Hmmm but that software would also last a century so… your point? Moving fast and building unstable software isn’t really that great.