> Finale felt heavily loaded down with legacy garbage
It seems like the letter fully confirms & validates your feeling. ;) There’s just no GUI software started 35 years ago that’s still alive and feels modern and unbloated. Okay, there might be something, but I want to see the examples that prove me wrong. Things that come to mind are like Photoshop or Word, both bloated with legacy and might be dying to web apps. Or Windows itself, also loaded down with legacy. UX standards and expectations have (thankfully) gone way up over time, and it’s practically impossible to keep up without starting over with fresh applications, especially for boutique shops.
I don't really like "bloated" as a descriptor, because it's so unspecific that it's hard to argue against. Does it mean the software is slow? Too cluttered and disorganized? Too feature-heavy? Compromised by backward compatibility?
In any case, Photoshop, Word, and Windows are not in Finale's position clearly, as they're still far and away leading their respective markets. So, whatever bloat they may have, it's not yet been fatal.
Other old software that's been kept current includes Maya, Blender, Firefox (Netscape), MacOS (NeXTSTEP). I'm sure there are many other examples.
That’s fair, ‘bloated’ is very vague. And TBH I have multiple stories of devs complaining about bloat in order to justify a complete rewrite that turned out to be multi-million-dollar mistakes.
OTOH, I’ve been developing software long enough that you see the same pattern over and over. All application software is fresh and fast at first, and then gets bloated over time, where bloated means it accrues technical debt and accrues hard-to-manage code and accrues features that conflict with each other and slow down development.
Maya’s definitely bloated, and it has been for decades. Users were complaining about it being slow and buggy and a mess of a UI when I was using Maya in production more than 20 years ago. I went to the Maya developer’s conference around maybe 2002 and the devs were complaining about it being hard to maintain.
MacOS got a total ground-up rewrite in between versions 9 and 10, and it helps they built the UI on top of an existing nix. I hope Firefox and Blender last as long as Finale, only time will tell.
But it’s a good point that some bloated software hasn’t died, I have to assume that is because they’re making enough money from it to continue its development. I guess that would be true for Finale too, but that the income isn’t sufficient to carry it forward.
> MacOS got a total ground-up rewrite in between versions 9 and 10, and it helps they built the UI on top of an existing nix.
The reason the parent mentioned NeXTSTEP is while MacOS between 9 and X is a ground-up rewrite if you compare those two, Mac OS X was an evolution of the NeXTSTEP codebase from 1989 (34 years ago).
> I went to the Maya developer’s conference around maybe 2002 and the devs were complaining about it being hard to maintain.
I'm not surprised. I'm a bit fuzzy on the pre-history of Maya, but I believe it incorporated software acquired from Alias, Wavefront, and TDI. However, I think part of the performance and bugginess might be from launching on expensive IRIX-based systems and transitioning to commodity hardware an Linux in the early 2000s.
I think part of the reason apps like Photoshop and Word got bloated is that their audience got watered down and are fairly mainstream software.
I'm sure there's a lot of old niche software that feels modern and unbloated. Nuke[1] is 31 years old and Houdini[2] is 27. Maya[3] is 26 years old. I would say Maya feels bloated--but at larger places I've worked, people have avoided the newer viewports with more features because the "legacy" viewports are so fast.
It may be hard to make it feel "modern," but I love how optimized "old" code can be if they've been able to resist rewriting it.
It seems like the letter fully confirms & validates your feeling. ;) There’s just no GUI software started 35 years ago that’s still alive and feels modern and unbloated. Okay, there might be something, but I want to see the examples that prove me wrong. Things that come to mind are like Photoshop or Word, both bloated with legacy and might be dying to web apps. Or Windows itself, also loaded down with legacy. UX standards and expectations have (thankfully) gone way up over time, and it’s practically impossible to keep up without starting over with fresh applications, especially for boutique shops.