Jonathan Blow posted this on Twitter:
"I kind of don't understand what's the big deal with these 'modern' "display servers" like Wayland / Mir / etc. it ought to be kind of simple actually, because we now have all this experience with drawing graphics and we know how it should go. So I wonder if it's just being made more complicated than it really needs to be, the same way GUI libraries always are. GUI libraries are generally terrible, but this is self-perpetuating as people making new GUI libs absorb bad assumptions from the old ones. There's an interview up with a Mir developer who mentions Mir is structured as communication via a protocol over sockets. And, like, I have literally NO IDEA why you would build a window system like that in 2014. It makes no sense to me at all. (But if you do decide that's how things should go, things become a lot more complicated, so that's at least part of the problem.)
A major reason computers are so unreliable and un-fun to use is because software is now a massive pile of overcomplication. When it comes to a core thing like a window system, that many programs will interface with, simplicity should be a high design priority. Because every bit of complication that goes into the window system propagates. EVERY SINGLE PROGRAM becomes more complicated. Every piece of software becomes harder to develop. The toll in man-years becomes HUGE very quickly. Yet for some reason people don't learn. I think there is some Stockholm Syndrome happening: programmers can't even imagine how much more they would get done if the underlying systems were as simple, reasonable and solid as they should be."
A major reason computers are so unreliable and un-fun to use is because software is now a massive pile of overcomplication. When it comes to a core thing like a window system, that many programs will interface with, simplicity should be a high design priority. Because every bit of complication that goes into the window system propagates. EVERY SINGLE PROGRAM becomes more complicated. Every piece of software becomes harder to develop. The toll in man-years becomes HUGE very quickly. Yet for some reason people don't learn. I think there is some Stockholm Syndrome happening: programmers can't even imagine how much more they would get done if the underlying systems were as simple, reasonable and solid as they should be."
I'm curious about HN's opinion on this.