Nothing is wrong with computers. Something is wrong with developers.
“You WILL accept our defined use cases for you. We aren’t interested in writing robust software. We’re interested in writing it badly in 2 days so we can spend the rest of the money on marketing.”
At a small enough company they’re often the same thing.
Also, on mobile, developers who make good, reliable, robust software are discouraged from making such things. There’s a reason there are so few pieces of “finished” software on mobile. Because you’ll invest months of your life into making an incredibly useful and functional tool, and a year later, the new version of the mobile OS will come out, and it’ll be “In the new version we’ve decided half of the operating system calls your software depends on are insecure, and three of the permissions that are necessary for your app to work no longer exist. Have fun rewriting the entire thing”, after which the developer very reasonably says to hell with it, and goes back to writing software for an ecosystem that doesn’t break every single user space application on a regular basis.
So yes, just by working in the mobile space, you’re already accepting trade-offs in making robust software by the very nature of the ecosystem.
200 MB modern application built on top of Chrome can’t handle a few files.
Emacs from the 70/80s can handle a thousand files. Something is wrong with computers.
Nothing is wrong with computers. Something is wrong with developers.
“You WILL accept our defined use cases for you. We aren’t interested in writing robust software. We’re interested in writing it badly in 2 days so we can spend the rest of the money on marketing.”
I’m sure most developers would prefer spending the necessary time to write something good. The problem is perverse incentives in the corporate model.
Sure, for normal software on a real platform. But in mobile it’s often small startups, which means this is explicitly what they WANT.
Again, the developers, or those in charge?
At a small enough company they’re often the same thing.
Also, on mobile, developers who make good, reliable, robust software are discouraged from making such things. There’s a reason there are so few pieces of “finished” software on mobile. Because you’ll invest months of your life into making an incredibly useful and functional tool, and a year later, the new version of the mobile OS will come out, and it’ll be “In the new version we’ve decided half of the operating system calls your software depends on are insecure, and three of the permissions that are necessary for your app to work no longer exist. Have fun rewriting the entire thing”, after which the developer very reasonably says to hell with it, and goes back to writing software for an ecosystem that doesn’t break every single user space application on a regular basis.
So yes, just by working in the mobile space, you’re already accepting trade-offs in making robust software by the very nature of the ecosystem.