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Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

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Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#41

Post by mjburgess »

iinnPP wrote: post #24

At my previous job I was given permission to fully rewrite the call centre script/tooling used by sales agents. I also came from that team, and took a quick detour to the data team before finally landing in a development role. Giving me a full understanding of not only the agents needs and wants, but the limits on data being fed into this system. The resulting page loaded 10 times faster than what it replaced, which…

It feels like we need a youtube channel dedicated to 30min case studies of this.

MS spent x months to build y, here it is in 3 days. etc. etc.

People do not realise how fast development and software can be if you design with those priorities. It's orders of magnitude.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#42

Post by 0xb0565e487 »

trollied wrote: post #5

I think performance simply just isn't on the radar of a big chunk of devs these days, especially self-taught ones. Front-end wise, what with the trend of using frameworks (react/vue/etc) & a billion lines of javascript downloaded from npm, it'd probably be too much of a task to even begin profiling.

As a "one of these day devs" I only care about performance when it starts becoming a problem and I see nothing wrong with the way I'm going about this.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#43

Post by vlvdus »

tgv wrote: post #19
gilbetron wrote: post #9

The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras. While the software isn't a…

Well, MS Word 5.1a on a mac ran really fine, as did all the Apple/ClarisWorks software. Word Perfect on a PC ran fine, too. Then came the inevitable bloat. Later versions of MS Word didn't run that smooth anymore, ClarisWorks became unsufferable. WP killed itself. There's still lean software. Mellel (for macOS, https://www.mellel.com ) is a very responsive editor, with a style edit model that's a bit different from W…

Interesting...I remember MS Word 5.1 on Mac being slow and crashing so often I was saving a new document every minute or so. Word Perfect (on the same mac) was stable and fast. But feature-wise both were complete for me - then and today I guess.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#44

Post by crazygringo »

j_leboulanger wrote: post #31
gilbetron wrote: post #9

The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras. While the software isn't a…

I would tend to disagree. In the 1990s System 7 would start in a few seconds from hard disk on a Mac SE/30. Word would start in less than a second (not sure which version it was), and most features we use today were available. Adobe Photoshop 3.0 would start in less than 3 seconds, and same with Premiere 1.0. Of course you lacked some memory protection features which could make the whole computer crash because of a s…

I'm pretty sure you're exaggerating quite a bit.

Anyone can watch this video [1] to see how long it actually took to boot up or launch Word. But bootup seems to take 20 seconds, and launching Word took 7 seconds. Which roughly matches my memory.

So about an order of magnitude slower than you're describing. (The SE/30 had a clock speed twice that of the SE, but launching things is mostly bound by the hard drive speed.)

Other things like saving a 3-line Word document took 6 seconds. Quitting Word took 6 seconds. Basically, everything was pretty slow back then.

In contrast, I just tried launching Word on my M1 MacBook, and it took about three quarters of a second. While saving a file is simply instantaneous, as is quitting. And launching Photoshop takes 7 seconds.

Edit: here's another video [2] opening Photoshop 2 which takes a full 28 seconds.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0O7heFHA-k

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP_JNatS2Sg

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#45

Post by Michelangelo11 »

"apex predator of grug is complexity

complexity bad

say again:

complexity very bad

you say now:

complexity very, very bad"

https://grugbrain.dev/

No really -- I would bet that the single greatest contribution comes from the massive growth in complexity, in all relevant areas, over the last 20+ years.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#46

Post by baxtr »

amalcon wrote: post #15
gilbetron wrote: post #9

The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras. While the software isn't a…

> MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, It's an old joke at this point that you can tell when a person first became a serious computer user based on how frequently they save their work. My muscle memory for ctrl+s is so ingrained that I type it every minute or two in things like Google Docs that literally ignore it.

I remember playing “Maniac Mansion” for 12h without saving. Right before the end my computer crashed. All was lost. But at least I did the second run in 8h.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#47

Post by bob1029 »

gilbetron wrote: post #9

The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras. While the software isn't a…

> The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth

All you need to do to prove to yourself how bad things have gotten is to find an old PC (or VM) and load up a copy of Windows XP.

The amount of bullshit between mouse click & updated photons arriving back at your eyeballs is insane in 2023. Software used to be much faster than me. Now, it is significantly slower. The only things that are reliably better are our networks and hardware.

I saw a recent talk on Blazor wherein Steve Sanderson ran through an example in an old version of visual studio. Watching how fast the project loaded actually made me depressed in a real and deep way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nRDdeIMGVo (@ 45:15)

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#48

Post by acomjean »

agentultra wrote: post #7

I worked at a hole-in-the-wall-you've-never-heard-of software company that landed big contracts with large multinationals consistently that, from the customers' perspective, came down to one reason: it wasn't SAP. The licensing model of large, enterprise software does have ramifications for users on the floor. In this case it's because the software had a per-seat license and required expensive consultants to modify y…

My first software job was doing custom lotus notes database applications. One of the ones I was working on was going to be overlapped by future SAP implementation..

my boss said do it, because it was so much cheaper and no one could say when or if the SAP would be installed. They had to map the business to SAP, instead of having the software be flexible.

But it turns out when you build something that fulfills a business need and makes employees life’s easier they like it.. a lot. Even if it’s just a Lotus Notes database application. I even won a very minor award for that one.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#49

Post by CharlesW »

j_leboulanger wrote: post #31
gilbetron wrote: post #9

The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras. While the software isn't a…

I would tend to disagree. In the 1990s System 7 would start in a few seconds from hard disk on a Mac SE/30. Word would start in less than a second (not sure which version it was), and most features we use today were available. Adobe Photoshop 3.0 would start in less than 3 seconds, and same with Premiere 1.0. Of course you lacked some memory protection features which could make the whole computer crash because of a s…

> In the 1990s System 7 would start in a few seconds from hard disk on a Mac SE/30.

A fresh System 7 install on an SE/30 would boot from a hard drive in ~20 seconds. Adding system extensions could double this pretty easily.

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