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Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem

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Re: Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem

#81

Post by IncRnd »

arexxbifs wrote: post #77

> About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage. That would be in 1970, but my guess is that "ed" would be a hard sell today. There is plenty of bloat to go around these days and I think we could do a lot more to address that. But we've all got too much skin in the web game to own up to the embarrassing fact that a chat program that's basically IRC with pict…

Maybe ed would be a difficult sell today, but vi came out in 1976, the essence of which is still in use.

Re: Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem

#82

Post by vl »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #61
LeftHandPath wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the core point of the article, but I agree with your points as well. The conclusion of the article is definitely wrong. I recently buddied up with someone who has a CS degree to try and make a desktop app, as a side project. I asked if he is familiar with MariaDB and whether or not he's used C++ ODBC. Our discussion quickly turned into choosing libraries / existing code. He uses Spring and Hibernate and…

> " It seems there are two distinct branches of computing emerging - one where performance matters, and one where it doesn't. " The unfortunate corollary being that the prevalence of developers who treat it as if it doesn't makes it darned hard to find one who treats as if it does when you need one. > " Applications made for "consumers" tend to be made like a cheap car " Not really a great analogy. The Prius has a re…

The main reason Priuses are used as cabs are local regulations, i.e. airports not allowing non-hybrid cabs, etc. For passengers experience is sub-standard compared to regular cabs.

Re: Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem

#83

Post by rabidrat »

arexxbifs wrote: post #77

> About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage. That would be in 1970, but my guess is that "ed" would be a hard sell today. There is plenty of bloat to go around these days and I think we could do a lot more to address that. But we've all got too much skin in the web game to own up to the embarrassing fact that a chat program that's basically IRC with pict…

> more than I like saving a few fractions of a percent of my hard drive space.

Hard disk space is seldom the actual issue. Instead, it's bandwidth used (too expensive to download over a mobile connection, or maybe not even feasible to download over a low-quality connection), or memory requirements (can't reliably use slack + spreadsheet + photoshop at the same time), or power consumption (laptop out of battery in 1 hour).

Do you like split-window, code-folding, etc etc so much that you can't download it while traveling in a rural area, have to close it so you can run Photoshop, and have to carry a spare battery so you can use it for the entirety of a 3-hour plane ride?

Re: Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem

#84

Post by cblconfederate »

UweSchmidt wrote: post #18

There are many complaints but there doesn't seem to be a real movement to make/use/cultivate small and fast software for all purposes. I'd join. Fragmented parts could be suckless.org, old cheap thinkpads from ebay, fast Linux distros, unix command line tools, retrocomputing, raspberry pi; all things with communities and fans who like a certain quality, simplicity and the good old days.

Someone could write a manifesto. I hear clock cycles are bad for the environment. And what if we want to run that software on our spaceship on the way to A Centauri?

Re: Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem

#85

Post by IncRnd »

horsawlarway wrote: post #23

This article is the problem. It's the same freaking fallacy I see again and again on here - It's simple, easy to understand, and dead fucking wrong. The vast majority of the complexity you're dealing with in modern computing comes from three sources. In the order of impact 1. Networking. It turns out there are real and hard limits on how fast we can pass data around over copper wires. Fiber is better, but you just li…

That's just not true.

1. Networking isn't the number one source of complexity, since local apps can be bloated, slow, buggy, and complex.

2. Security is not a consequence of networking. A non-networked system can be insecure, and a networked system can be secure. Security is more normally viewed in the context of confidentiallity, integrity, and availibility along with the concepts of authentication, authorization, and accountability.

3. Compatibility is not a consequence of either networking or security.

Your comment makes it seem that you believe complexity comes from having to adhere to constraints. That attitude is the issue! Not wanting to adhere to constraints is why software is bloated, complex, full of thousands of components, slow, etc.

Re: Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem

#86

Post by cortesoft »

rossdavidh wrote: post #20

There is an analogous problem in city design, wherein it was discovered that it was empirically not possible to get the average commute down below a certain time, because as more roads were built people moved further away from town. If you build more lanes to your roads, you don't get a faster commute, you get more sprawl. People spend time making software less bloated, when it's the number one problem they have. Whe…

Yeah, you are describing Braess's Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox

It is a form of Induced Demand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

Re: Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem

#87

Post by IncRnd »

pacaro wrote: post #63

What gets me is part of the '95 quote about computing in the 70s "About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage" Such a text editor likely couldn't handle lowercase in English, let alone any other Latin script language, let alone cjkv or bi-di. The bloat in software of 95 and the present day is real, but there is no real effort to make an apples to apples co…

That text editor seems to have been enough for Wirth to create the Pascal and Oberon languages. VI came out in 1976. Even today, lots of people use VI or some derivative of it.

Re: Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem

#88

Post by mikl »

All that “bloat” enables us to do (much) more with less developer hours.

The balance is the same as ever, developer time vs. compute power. As compute power gets ever cheaper, and developer time still costs the same, we put bigger burdens on the machine to save developer time.

In other words, simple economics.

Re: Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem

#89

Post by cmrdporcupine »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #80
horsawlarway wrote: post #23

This article is the problem. It's the same freaking fallacy I see again and again on here - It's simple, easy to understand, and dead fucking wrong. The vast majority of the complexity you're dealing with in modern computing comes from three sources. In the order of impact 1. Networking. It turns out there are real and hard limits on how fast we can pass data around over copper wires. Fiber is better, but you just li…

Networking isn't the bottleneck. As John Carmack quipped, "I can send an IP packet to Europe faster than I can send a pixel to the screen. How f’d up is that?" Usually if there is latency caused by networking in an application it's usually unneeded roundtrips caused by inefficient programmers or inefficient layers in the software stack. It's insane how much overhead there is.

I am completely baffled by this quip.

At speed of light in a vacuum, from New York to London is 19ms. That's the physical limit of what a network could ever hope to accomplish, but in reality in fiber it's apparently about 28ms.

At 60fps we need to present a new set of pixels to the screen every 16ms.

So in the time that a packet goes in one direction to Europe we could have presented almost two full frames of pixels.

Even on the rather slow old SoC in the Google Nest Home Hub platform that I work on, we're able to do quite a bit of pixel crunching in that 16ms. Even with code written in JavaScript, or Dart. Enough to make our users mostly happy.

John Carmack is much smarter than me, so I can't believe he meant this literally, or it's been taken out of context.

The network is definitely a bottleneck.

Re: Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem

#90

Post by arexxbifs »

rabidrat wrote: post #83
arexxbifs wrote: post #77

> About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage. That would be in 1970, but my guess is that "ed" would be a hard sell today. There is plenty of bloat to go around these days and I think we could do a lot more to address that. But we've all got too much skin in the web game to own up to the embarrassing fact that a chat program that's basically IRC with pict…

> more than I like saving a few fractions of a percent of my hard drive space. Hard disk space is seldom the actual issue. Instead, it's bandwidth used (too expensive to download over a mobile connection, or maybe not even feasible to download over a low-quality connection), or memory requirements (can't reliably use slack + spreadsheet + photoshop at the same time), or power consumption (laptop out of battery in 1 h…

> bandwidth

Why would I download a text editor every time I wanted to use it? Even VS Code is stored locally, ready to be used off-line. But let's not pick an Electron app for _everything_ we want to do: last time I checked, Notepad++ does all of what I listed, and more.

> memory requirements

Yes, this can be a problem and is a sure sign of bloat. Meanwhile, I think we're bad at picking our software: why do we just sit back and accept stuff like this? I've got 8 gigs of RAM in my dirt cheap home laptop and I can run Gimp, GNumeric, Firefox and watch a movie at the same time just fine, with plenty of RAM left to spare. For professional use, requirements are and have always been higher: hence the $15k workstations of yesteryear.

I think we're doing a bad job at promoting that the use of native software would likely have the outcome of higher productivity and lower hardware costs, because that would probably mean we're putting our own cushy web coding jobs on the line, too.

> battery life

There are still some hard limits we have to take into account. Even if I for some reason did have to work with both programming and Photoshop on a 3 hour plane ride (I luckily do not), I don't think the answer to my problems would be to switch to "ed".

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