A hipster software rant

I have been called a hipster many a times and that is because I don't really like mainstream things and, instead, choose to see beauty and purpose somewhere else. I'm not really a hipster, though, since the trends I am following are not the latest and I have no sense of fashion. But enough about me. Let's talk about software and it's latest incarnation: mobile and HTML5/javascript and how I despise the hype around something that is, let's put it simply, a combination of lazy programming and market forces. No real innovation, no quality, no soul. A Hollywood of software, if you will.

People, I've seen this before and so have you. There was a time when computing was done on devices that had single digit megahertz chips at their core. Applications and games thrived. Programmers would always complain about the lack of resources and there was a time when 64KB of memory was thought enough for most computing purposes. It was that time that spawned the algorithmic generation, the guys that usually ask you what a graph is or how to manually do a bubble sort on paper when they hire you to work on web sites. You needed to make your software slim and efficient to work on those devices. Then the processor power, memory and drive capacity just exploded. Each step of the way, applications and games thrived. The problem was... they were the same as before, only larger. Wolfenstein became Doom became Quake became Counter Strike became Call of Duty and beyond, the resolution, the realism, the environment ever evolving, but the game staying the same: get some guns and kill something. But still, it was OK, we like things bigger, we want more pixels. It doesn't matter that the Windows operating system grows exponentially to use the increasing space and processing power, yet we use it in about the same way as before. It doesn't matter that the single player games just look better and have the same or even less complexity than the games ten years before. It's a status quo we can live with.

But then browsers came along. Suddenly, there is a whole new market: online apps. One server to bind them all. And we again lament the lack of resources, as we use slow javascript and try the ever annoying Java applets and somehow we settle on Flash. It can be used on any operating system, almost any browser, let's make games with it and place them online. The only reason we do not make entire web sites in Flash remaining SEO. And we lament the lack of programming tools for something that was originally created only for online animation for commercial ads, but we can live with it. All the games we played so joyfully on 80386 processor machines we can now play in a browser, in Flash, on machines that are 100 times faster. No problem there.

Then the smartphones and tablets arrived, with their new operating systems, their weird resolutions and their direct dislike of Flash. Suddenly Flash is no good anymore: it is not open enough, not fast enough, not compatible enough. Instead, let's switch to HTML5 and Javascript, the backbone of the Web. Let's use those. Sure, now we need a faster Javascript, so we think on it a little and Kaboom! Javascript is suddenly 8 times faster. We need new HTML concepts and ideas and Kapow! the HTML standard suddenly changes after years of wallowing between panels and committees. Nothing can stand in the way of change now, we even have portable devices that are faster than the computers we used 10 years ago.

And so we get to today, when my Athlon II 2500+ computer is too slow to play flash games without overheating, because they are made with frameworks designed to output HTML and Javascript. And that is why I can't even move the mouse in browser based HTML5 and Javascript games, even if what the page I am on only wants to do is let me play Angry Birds, a game that would have worked fine, with almost the same level of graphics and certainly the same level of intelligence and entertainment, on a 33Mhz computer from 20 years ago.

I could live with all that, though. I could buy another computer, after all it is a wonder this one even works anymore, but it bothers me so much that I have games and films and software that have been working on this machine for so long and they are mostly better than what I can find today. It bothers me to buy a smartphone or a tablet only to see my rights to use it restricted and conditioned from the people that make them. It bothers me to have lived 20 years with computers, only to have more pixels at the end. I can even imagine my LCD coffin, being put into the ground, with people crying over the touching (really, you can touch them!) floating images from it, while some people would discuss the number of pixels the coffin has. He lived a good life, he got pixels.