{"id":84,"date":"2002-06-19T10:18:00","date_gmt":"2002-06-19T15:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=84"},"modified":"2002-06-19T10:18:00","modified_gmt":"2002-06-19T15:18:00","slug":"beating-software-version-fatigue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=84","title":{"rendered":"Beating software version fatigue"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In his latest<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.techcentralstation.com\/1051\/techwrapper.jsp?PID=1051-250&#038;CID=1051-061902B\">Tech Central Station column<\/a>, Glenn Reynolds complains<br \/>\nof `version fatigue&#8217;, his accumulating angst over the fact that since the<br \/>\nemid-1980s he&#8217;s had to migrate through three word processors and several<br \/>\ndifferent versions of Windows.<\/p>\n<p>I can&#8217;t fix the sad fact that every new VCR and remote control you get<br \/>\nhas a different control layout.  But if we&#8217;re talking software, baby, I have<br \/>\ngot your solution.<\/p>\n<p>I have been using the same text editor since 1982.  I have been using the<br \/>\nsame command-line shell since 1985, and the same operating system since 1993.<br \/>\nBut that last date is actually misleading, because I still get use out of<br \/>\nprograms I wrote for the previous dialect of my OS as far back as 1982,<br \/>\nwithout ever having had to alter a line.<\/p>\n<p>The last time I had to learn a new feature set for any of the tools<br \/>\nI regularly used was when I decided to change window systems in 1997,<br \/>\nand that was not a vendor-forced upgrade.  Yes, that&#8217;s right; it means<br \/>\nI&#8217;ve been getting mileage out of essentially the same user interface<br \/>\nfor five straight years.  Half a decade.<\/p>\n<p>Does this mean I&#8217;m using software tools that were feature-frozen when<br \/>\ndinosaurs walked the earth?  No, actually, it doesn&#8217;t.  The text editor,<br \/>\nwhich is what I spend my screen time interacting with, has grown tremendously<br \/>\nin capability over the twenty years I&#8217;ve been using it.  The shell I use<br \/>\nhas a lot of convenience features it didn&#8217;t in 1985, but I&#8217;ve only had<br \/>\nto learn them as I chose.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t have a version-fatigue problem, and never have.  I get to<br \/>\nuse cutting-edge software tools that probably exceed in capability<br \/>\nanything you are directly familiar with.  And I have every confidence,<br \/>\nbased on my last twenty years of experience, that my software will both<br \/>\ncontinue to both offer me the innovative leading edge and remain<br \/>\nfeature-stable for the next twenty years if I so choose.<\/p>\n<p>How do I achieve this best of both worlds?  One word: Unix.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m a Unix guy.  You may have heard that I have something to do<br \/>\nwith this Linux thing, and Linux is indeed what I use today.  But<br \/>\nLinux is only the most recent phase of a continuous engineering<br \/>\ntradition that goes back to 1969.  In that world, we don&#8217;t have<br \/>\nthe kind of disruptive feature churn that forces people to upgrade<br \/>\nto incompatible operating systems every 2.5 years.  Our software<br \/>\nlifetimes are measured in <em>decades<\/em>. And our applications,<br \/>\nlike the Emacs text editor I use, frequently outlast the version<br \/>\nof Unix they were born under.<\/p>\n<p>There are a couple of intertwined reasons for this.  One is that<br \/>\nwe tend to get the technology decisions right the first time &#8212; Unix<br \/>\nis, as Niklaus Wirth once said of Algol, &#8220;a vast improvement over<br \/>\nmost of its successors&#8221;.  Unix people confronted with Windows for<br \/>\nthe first time tend to react with slack-jawed shock that any product<br \/>\nso successful could be such a complete design disaster.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps more importantly, Unix\/Linux people are not stuck with a<br \/>\nbusiness model that requires planned obsolescence in order to generate<br \/>\nrevenue.  Also, our engineering tradition puts a high value on open<br \/>\nstandards.  So our software tends to be forward-compatible.<\/p>\n<p>As an example: about a year ago I changed file-system formats from<br \/>\next2 to ext3.  In the Windows world, I&#8217;d have had to back up all my<br \/>\nfiles, reinstall the OS, restore my files, and then spend a week<br \/>\nhand-fixing bits of my system configuration that weren&#8217;t captured in<br \/>\nthe backups.  Instead, I ran one conversion utility.  Once.<\/p>\n<p>Most of the consumer-level problems with computer software &#8212;<br \/>\ncrashes, bad design, version fatigue due to the perpetual upgrade<br \/>\ntreadmill &#8212; are not inherent in the technology. They are, rather,<br \/>\nconsequences of user-hostile business models.  Microsoft, and<br \/>\ncompanies like them, have no incentive to solve the problems<br \/>\nof crashes, poor security, and version fatigue.  They <em>like<\/em><br \/>\nthe perpetual upgrade treadmill.  It&#8217;s how they make money.<\/p>\n<p>Want to beat software version fatigue? It&#8217;s easy, Glenn.  Take<br \/>\ncontrol; dump the closed-source monopolists; get off the treadmill.<br \/>\nOpenOffice will let you keep your MS-Word documents and your Excel<br \/>\nspreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.  Join the Linux revolution,<br \/>\nand never see a Blue Screen of Death again.<\/p>\n<p>UPDATE: A reader complains that Linux is difficult to install.<br \/>\nAnswer: Get thee to the Linux user group near you, who will be more<br \/>\nthan happy to help you get liberated.  Or get thee to Wal-Mart, which<br \/>\nis now selling cheap machines with Lindows, a Linux variant tuned to<br \/>\nlook like Windows, for $299.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/enetation.co.uk\/comments.php?user=esr&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;commentid=77940749\">Blogspot<br \/>\ncomments<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In his latest Tech Central Station column, Glenn Reynolds complains of `version fatigue&#8217;, his accumulating angst over the fact that since the emid-1980s he&#8217;s had to migrate through three word processors and several different versions of Windows. I can&#8217;t fix the sad fact that every new VCR and remote control you get has a different&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=84\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Beating software version fatigue<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=84"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=84"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=84"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=84"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}