Crap Software | Soapbox Nation

Crap Software

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By agentrnge , at 10/22/2009 12:51 PM to Science & Tech

Reputation Level: 44 - Post Count: 34

Location: New Jersey USA

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Crap software sucks hard.

I have had a gripe with java for a while. Maybe it is not the language directly, but it seems to enable lazy/sloppy/lack of care programming styles that lead to horrid programs. Java is great for a small tool, such as a mortgage calculator.

Java is not great for an "Enterprise Class" application. They all run slow. They all take up way too much memory. They all hang for seemingly no reason all the time.

There is too much reliance on "automatic" functionality.

Storage and system vendors love to write their user interfaces and management consoles in java. We have one such Java application that attempts to manage a 25 switch / 2500 device port SAN fabric. All switches are managed on a local network. The software itself only directly touches the 25 SAN switches.

It takes several minutes of "loading" or "waiting" in between every single step. It crashes often, and fails to display updates when it polls devices.

It gets slower and slower with each upgrade to its own code or to the java environment code.

It sits there using 100% of 4 CPUs and 1.5 gigs of ram any time you do anything. This years version of the software was pitched as a "much improved back end". They reworked the database and changed how configs were pushed out. Instead of pushing out a copy of the configs to all switches over the management 100Mbit Ethernet, the server pushes the config to one "seed " switch device. That seed switch then relays the config to all other switch devices in-band, ( over a the multi-gigabit SAN Inter Switch Link connections ). It was supposed to be faster.

Pushing out a config to the switches can take a solid 2 minutes with the current version. Earlier versions of the software ( before it was improved ) took about 5 seconds to push out the same configuration.

What the hell? Frustrating!

Programmers: Consider yourself master craftsmen. Do not be code monkeys. Do not suck at your trade.

Software Companies: Encourage your programmers to be artists. Do not hire code monkeys. Do not rate them on "lines of code per day". You end up with bloated, garbage software that no one enjoys using. Costing everyone time and frustration when ever your software is used.

Bean Counters: Hiring cheap programmers and having them crank out crap software fast costs you less today, but: Tomorrow when thousands of users are calling in with problems you require a very large staff of customer service people to handle the calls. This costs you money. Next week when the programmers try to fix and modify the mess of code they will find it difficult and time consuming. This will cost you money . When the general public has given up on your product due to non stop problems from bad software, and you loose market share. This will cost you money. Cheap , poor quality software cost you more, later, always.

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