I think about this a lot when I see UI redesigns that "look fresh" or "updated" while actually reducing productivity and degrading the life of the humans who need computers to get stuff done. All for some vague concept from the head of a "visionary" who often doesn't use the system to solve the problems it is meant to solve.

But you also need to make your software good for you as a programmer too. As programmers we’re like builders. What we build today becomes our workspace tomorrow. Leaving a codebase neat and tidy makes it easier to spot bugs and make changes down the road. You can overdo it, but spending 20 minutes adding unit tests today could save you a week of debugging 6 months down the line.

Ask a techie and they'll probably say it's something to be maintained and updated, to be replaced on a given lifecycle because new things demand it, that it's an achievement of technology or something. A computer to the tech industry is the end to a means.

Ask a common man and they'll probably say it's a tool to get stuff done. That 'puter in the corner working happily for the past 50 years? It's great, gets the work done and puts food on the table at night like any other tool (also 50 years old) on their 50 years old workbench. A computer to common men is a means to an end.

I hope some day the tech industry comes to terms with this disconnect. The users would absolutely be better off for it.

Also I would say software may not deteriorate on its own, but in the context of other software/technologies moving forward it does deteriorate. For example many old games kind of have deteriorated because they don't easily run on modern OS any more.

This ^^^ it totally annoys me having to relearn programs when I'm faster with 16bit versions from the early 00's.

It has nothing to do with software design decisions and everything to do with a cost/benefit equation in the mind of someone with one foot out the door. I’ve seen this with senior DBA’s and CEOs alike. They are not objectively good judges of “what works” for anyone except themselves because of this huge conflict of interest.

I sincerely believe you see the same thing with the elderly at a certain point - I’ve known a few people that after like 85 have zero interest and feel zero compulsion to “stay on top of” new ways of doing things, whether it’s software, vehicles, whatever. They’ve got enough skills to make it out and why trouble yourself with stuff that doesn’t matter?

I understand it, but am not sure it’s wise for a retiree. For instance, Excel may come in handy for that guy doing budget planning or contracting gigs later.

Add to that, the further behind you slide with technology, the harder it is to catch back up. You miss out on integrating the models, paradigms, and affordances, and a couple gens of compounding evolution happen without you and the learning curve becomes much steeper than it needs to be. It’s like keeping your house clean by doing little bits frequently rather than massive efforts rarely.

Almost no one want to use the tool. They want to use the tool to do the thing they want to do. For example, it is rare that someone would buy a piece of wood just so they could cut with their new saw. They might decide to make a table so they can cut with their new saw, but they are not going to use a tool to use a tool, it has to provide clear value to them. In this case, for this person, they were willing to learn new technologies (as I think evidenced by using DosBOX on an iPad in 2012, though I didn’t say that in the original comment, this was a very very clunky system then. I think they didn’t use an external keyboard) but not for the thing that was on their critical path, if there was not a clear improvement in outcome.

I didn’t provide a clear improvement in outcome, I just provided a better tool. After this person had been doing their job for as long as they had, using the tool they had, investing in a better tool for that job didn’t make sense. They also knew whoever came after them would probably not want to use their tool there, so why change it?

Put yet another way (since I didn’t do a great job the first time, I’ll try again), nobody wants to use business software. I have written line-of-business, not consumer, software most of my career. Even now, where I work and we have a solidly engineered, designed, custom CRM/glue software that was been improving since the late 90s that really fits the business well, no one goes into work in the morning thinking, ‘yay, I get to use our CRM today!’ And definitely no one thinks, ‘yay, I get to use JIRA and SAP today!’ They may think, if they even think about our software at all, ‘hey, this doesn’t stink’ but a recently I found out someone was exporting a table of data to Excel and then spending 4-8 hours a week creating a report, and I was able to turn that into the press of a couple buttons and picking a few values in a day, and now they get to do more of the things that bring our company value and make their job more interesting and they love that they get to use my software to do it. They don’t care that I used a mini Vue app with an AJAX call to create the interface instead of our older form/POST paradigm, they care about what the tool let them do.

That’s the value that I see computer systems, when thought about and executed well, providing to users everywhere. Not doing tasks better, but doing the right tasks, for the right people, at the right time.

To extend this yet another way, and hopefully establish my point firmly, I was thinking of the above situation as a win-win. I got to say just use Excel, they got to use a modern piece of software, what would be better? In the same way, the guys in my company’s IT Operations group see saying that the new hotel desks in the office are all double 24 in monitor setups. I do not really like using double monitors, I prefer one large monitor, like the 32in that is still kicking at the office from the pre-COVID times. I asked them to just give me one flex desk that had the large monitor, that I could use when I came in, we already have the monitor, please! But they feel like it would generate more tickets, and they are already overworked(and they are!) so no single monitor for me. They see it as win-win, they reduce their ticket burden, have more time for other things our manufacturing conglomerate needs, most people like dual monitors, so overall win-win. But I don’t like it and now my weekly trip into the office is a little less comfortable because my ergonomics are wrong, my muscle memory for where my windows are is wrong, and yes I can learn new things but the tools are made for man, not man for the tools.

I know that was long, hopefully that helped clarify my comments.

I was at a farmers once and got talking to his wife about Lotus and she showed me what she had built. She had a few boxes of software and books above her desk. The Lotus 123 box looked different than mine and found out she had version 1, not version 1A like the overwhelming majority that were sold.

I told her to never throw away that box and disks because sometime in the distant future she had a relatively rare collectors item. She laughed and said with my luck a competitor will come along and no one will ever want a rare copy. She may have been right.

My maternal grandfather-in-law recounts that he said the same thing when he was close to retirement, but regrets it badly today. The skills someone was trying to teach him, it turns out, would have been very valuable skills also in retirement.

I know this because my dad ran Quattro Pro, a Lotus 1-2-3 competitor up until around 2020 (he finally retired but still might use it for other reasons) and we had to keep figuring out how to keep it working over the years.