I did think about putting this in ctrl-alt-del rant, but this seems a, slightly, more logical place for it.
Niklaus Wirth died at the very beginning if this year. You may not know the name, but he was particularly well known in ComSci and programming circles especially for the Pascal & Modula languages. I have fond memories of using the Watford implementation of ISO Pascal on a Beeb.
Nigh on 30 years ago he wrote a short paper on the need to keep software lean. Well we all know what happened to that ideal, don't we?
https://cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdfAnd to mark his death that plea/analysis was updated by Bert Hubert
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/a-2024-plea-for-lean-software/Neither of these articles is especially technical nor long so I would suggest that, when you've got a quarter of an hour or so to spare, that you do read them so that, the next time you are swearing in incoherent rage at a some terminally enshittified web site, application or operating system, you know where the blame lies.
If you can't be bothered to read either piece I'll leave you with the last sentence of Wirth's paper,
“The plague of software explosion is not a ’law of nature’. It is avoidable, and it is the software engineer’s task to curtail it”
Cheers,
Lurk