Why is so much software so bloated?

To me, it is sickening to see how software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. And nobody appears to have any feeling of guilt about it. People are happy to use bloat technologies, noone knows how to write lean and fast software any more. Why is that so?

I don't even have to point at Mozilla, GNOME or KDE, everyone who tested those knows how excruciatingly bloated those are. Holy wars abound which one is less bug-ridden and cause less crashes. Sometimes, I wish back the times where people had to work with a few kilobytes of RAM. Back then, software bloat simply caused applications not to work. Today, we have workarounds like good virtual memory systems where unused bloat is not loaded from disk, but that just solves the symptom, not the problem.

Why is today's software quality so bad? Why do users accept software when using it is like wading through a tar pit? And if someone sets out to write a new piece of software, the first thing they do is reuse bloat-ridden monster components from others. "Hey, they bloat is not coming from me", I hear them say. People even get away with calling something like gtkhtml or galeon "light-weight". Aren't they seeing the megs upon megs of Xlib, Xt and Gtk bloat those apps are carring around? I don't get it.

Does anyone have an idea why this is so and what to do about it? People are actually spending money to get even more bloat on their new hard disks they bought because the old one couldn't hold the old bloat. The typical Linux distribution today eats much more disk space than the typical Windows installation. Sigh.

Money. It started with CS courses in college have being replaced with Java centric class diagramming courses, then moved to a full UML explaination of computers, combined with all the buzzwords you can image. This was done to push out as many graduates as possible, as fast as possible to fill the appetite of the first dotcom bubble. A good programmer can get as much productive work done on novel things as twenty of these xode monkeys, but the code monkeys can shit out new inventory systems every week to satisfy the cient. If there are bigs, well, it happens, and the client has to pay again to get it fixed. Problems have to be just mild enough that they can't sue.

It probably can't be fixed. Or if it can, it will take billions to trillions to reverse all the damage, rewrite software properly, and buy enough toilets for the old code monkeys to scrub.

By definition. If the software is bloated, there is so much of it.

If there are bigs, well, it happens, and the client has to pay again to get it fixed

In other words, it's all about the money. Companies have an incentive to NOT make non-buggy software, because then they can keep milking their customers.

The fact that a lot of "open source" "free software" is written by people with corporate interests is why Linux distros have gone from a more efficient alternative to worse-than-Windows bloatiness.

http://countercomplex.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-resource-leak-bug-of-our.html

Yup.
It's amazing how Windows used to run faster on my computer 5 years ago, but now it's sluggish because of all the shit they constantly put in each version

Cudder is all talk and no action.

>>4
Linux was never an efficient alternative. Ken Thompsan said it was worse than windows himself

It's an arms race towards more features and eye-popping prettiness, because there's no other way for the layman to actually differentiate one software product from the other.
Nobody is forcing you to use Firefox, Windows or KDE either.

What's really amazing is that they can remove features and still end up with a bigger binary.

>>4
You would love OpenBSD.
Join us, Cudder.

http://homing-on-code.blogspot.com.br/2015/01/code-rot-openbsd.html

>>1
Define bloat. Developers use general frameworks and toolkits because they solve a massive range of common programming issues. If we had things your way, everybody would always reimplant such features in incompatible ways.

>>12

define

so you failed your intro logic 101 class you pseudo-intellectual normalfag

works for other people

LOL

>>13
It's just a buzzword without a definition m80. Shared libraries and API work for everybody. If it did not work in the general case, then it would be common sense that people would avoid them - they simply won't work.

>>12,14
Go scrub some toilets