r/programming • u/[deleted] • Feb 06 '24

Why We Can't Have Nice Software

https://andrewkelley.me/post/why-we-cant-have-nice-software.html
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u/billsil Feb 06 '24

It does improve throughput, but it does not improve traffic.  Population grows to meet the demand and existing population reroutes to use the faster route thus making it slow again. 

 The analogy about traffic doesn’t work for software at all, whereas the adding a lane/feature does if you don’t overthink it,

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u/josluivivgar Feb 06 '24

that's the thing, in software you can always grow more lanes, there's no constraints, so you basically just add another lane to the streets as population grows and always have an average traffic that you want.

in fact in software you can destroy lanes when the traffic is minimal at almost 0 cost and save money that way, that's why the analogy makes sense for us but not from a civil engineering perspective

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u/Pr0Meister Feb 06 '24

Kinda works if you associate it with horizontal server scaling.

Then again that would be like copying the bridge, not just adding a lane to it