He was right in 1995 and he still is. Bucky, as he was called at Standford, is one of founding generation of computer science that is still alive. Being 4 years older than Knuth he might even be the oldest one.
Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem
161–170 of 198 posts
Re: Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
It needs a SSD drive to boot faster. Otherwise it takes a few minutes instead of seconds. Windows 10 is for newer hardware anyway, it runs slow on older hardware.
You are completely missing their point. "For newer hardware" means slower . I remember how Windows 7 was so well-designed that it actually ran faster on my all of my old XP machines than XP did. It was a step up in performance, not a step down. In 2018 Microsoft disbanded the Windows team and moved engineering efforts to its cloud and AI teams. Windows 10 is on life support by engineers who aren't intimately familiar…
All non Azure MS products are legacy now.
Windows 10 is probably slow on HDDs because it's updating a load of UWP apps in the background, resmon.exe disk tab will show what's going on.
Re: Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem
#163Earlier 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…
Good post. I would add that since Moore's law is over, I think the long-term prospects for crap like electron and discord are not good. Future phones and laptops will (almost certainly) never be orders of magnitude more powerful for regular workloads, so assuming that people will want to do more and more with these devices, it seems that software that burns millions of cpu cycles and gigabytes of ram just to put some…
unfortunately, now the most messaging apps (teams, slack, signal come to mind) pack their UI with electron
Re: Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Users are happy until they saw better :) Today bloat doesn’t matter, tomorrow you’re are a fat dinosaur
Sure, but... that confirms this view.
This view is more akin to working class parents telling their children to become a builder because “people have always been building”.
You should not outsource your main product. And if your product is a chat application that is supposed to be fast and always on the background, then you’re outsourcing your main area of expertise.
Re: Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem
#165Modern software is doing orders of magnitude more than the software of the past. The feature set of a word processor in 1980 is a rounding error compared to the 2020 word processor’s print dialog.
The OP’s viewpoint is akin to claiming that aviation has not advanced beyond Kitty Hawk because modern aircraft are simply wasting fuel when they take to the skies. It doesn’t take into account the huge differences in the modern computing environment.
The computers of the recent past weren’t even powerful enough to encrypt a modern TLS session. Does that mean using all that power to encrypt the session today is “bloat”? Of course not. One person’s bloat is another person’s feature. Note that sometimes that feature is that the software can actually exist and be maintained on your preferred platform.
If you think about it, it would be an utterly bleak future if we were just running the exact same software stack on faster and faster hardware. That would represent stagnation, not progress.
Re: Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem
#166Earlier 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 thing is - there is no need to address performance if it does not matter. That would lead you to Knuth: "The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or…
but sometimes performance is dependent upon your framework, so before you start you will need to know your quantity structure
Re: Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just know you can run a full Linux desktop experience on top of twenty-year-old spinning rust just fine. Micro$oft drooped the ball big time if one needs a ssd just to use a OS.
they optimized for current hardware, sacrificing some performance on outdated hardware. I'd rather windows uses my SSD to the fullest, than that it makes concessions to spinning disks.
I'm not sure this is the right take, as I don't believe it's a matter of choosing to optimize for SSD vs. HDD's. Disks got faster, so the bar for baseline acceptable performance got higher.
Re: Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it's the other way around. Advances in computer hardware have allowed the use more inefficient programming languages allowing more inexperienced and unskilled programmers to create programs leading to more resource hungry programs. When there are little resource constraints the only real constraint becomes developer time. I don't see how having IDEs implemented in browsers has anything to do with security, the sp…
"allowing more inexperienced and unskilled programmers to create programs" You realize that this is a good thing, right?
Good for them, or for me?
Re: Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are completely missing their point. "For newer hardware" means slower . I remember how Windows 7 was so well-designed that it actually ran faster on my all of my old XP machines than XP did. It was a step up in performance, not a step down. In 2018 Microsoft disbanded the Windows team and moved engineering efforts to its cloud and AI teams. Windows 10 is on life support by engineers who aren't intimately familiar…
All non Azure MS products are legacy now. Windows 10 is probably slow on HDDs because it's updating a load of UWP apps in the background, resmon.exe disk tab will show what's going on.
Ironically, Mark Russinovich, the author of Regmon, is now responsible for Azure
Re: Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
It needs a SSD drive to boot faster. Otherwise it takes a few minutes instead of seconds. Windows 10 is for newer hardware anyway, it runs slow on older hardware.
You are completely missing their point. "For newer hardware" means slower . I remember how Windows 7 was so well-designed that it actually ran faster on my all of my old XP machines than XP did. It was a step up in performance, not a step down. In 2018 Microsoft disbanded the Windows team and moved engineering efforts to its cloud and AI teams. Windows 10 is on life support by engineers who aren't intimately familiar…
It was a re-org, those engineering teams just moved to be under CAI or ED. The people are still there.