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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

#81

Post by torstenvl »

ramesh31 wrote: post #53

People care about features. They don't care if a page takes 2 seconds to load or has a thousand npm packages holding it up. They care that they can click a button and it does the thing that they need to do to accomplish their task. This stuff is all magic and pixie dust to 99.9% of people. And if adding the new feature creates bloat and slowness, so be it. If this tiny little seemingly insignificant thing that user w…

Microsoft had to force people off XP and then again off Windows 7.

Firefox ate Netscape's (edit: Mozilla Suite's) lunch.

Oracle eventually had to buy MySQL to stop the bleeding (and try to upsell).

So no. While people do prefer a 100% solution over a 90% solution, they much more strongly prefer a 90% solution now over a 100% solution that keeps them at work an extra hour or two nearly every day.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#84

Post by NoGravitas »

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 mean, it's also possible that that's because the SE/30 was running software designed to also support slower machines like the Mac Plus, Mac SE, or Mac II? The SE/30 was kind of a beast when it came out.

In fact, I'm going to directly relate this to Wirth's Law. I think there was a brief span of years where software didn't get slower as quickly as hardware got faster. My experience of the early 90s was that my computer was slow as hell, and those of my more well-heeled friends were incredibly fast.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#85

Post by agentultra »

ROTMetro wrote: post #75
agentultra wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our sales people had connections in the industry that led us into various "approved vendor" lists. This eventually allowed us to worm our way into getting demos with floor managers who could use some of their budget to buy our software. Word of mouth spread from there and within a couple of years we were driving their IT department up the wall. It was grass-roots and the end-users, the people on the floor doing the w…

And probably broke their MRP/ERP systems. But the IT departments probably came up with workaround to get data out of the system and feed the ERP/MRP system just enough to keep things going but probably way less efficiently than they would have ultimately been if pain points would have been addressed in the existing system instead of the virus of your software injected inappropriately. And then you probably badmouthed…

Haha, yeah I get that. That's why I sat in on calls with their IT folks. We made it as easy as we could to get data back out of our system. We exported in a bunch of different formats and could integrate with several ERP/MRP/BI systems directly.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#86

Post by prmph »

quicklime wrote: post #77
prmph wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really disagree on this one. It's true lots of software were unreliable back in the day. But: - Crashes sometimes != Slow, bloated, and unreliable. I'd rather have something simple and responsive that crashes every now and then, than something that is aggravating to use all the time. - With the massive increase in hardware performance, there's just no excuse at all for slow unresponsive software now, especially from…

> VSCode and Visual Studio are two completely different products, one is a code editor, and the other is a full blown IDE What does Visual Studio from around 2000 have that VSCode doesn't? I get that VSCode offloads a lot of work to the language server and extensions, but it offers IDE-like features including auto-completion, code navigation, and the UI is more than just code editing - it integrates version control,…

> What does Visual Studio from around 2000 have that VSCode doesn't?

A visual GUI designer, for example. Also a visual database model designer. Code generation too, and more

These are resource demanding features

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#87

Post by JohnFen »

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.

It's not entirely a myth. MS Word is not a representative example, though. It's been pretty awful from the start.

Today's software, on average, is very much larger and less performant than software from the olden days, and generally is not more featureful.

What is is, is cheaper to produce and modern software tends to have a much prettier (and graphical!) user interface.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#88

Post by SilasX »

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.

To this day I always copy comments to the clipboard before submitting them or after I feel like I've put a lot of work into them -- owing to dubious browser UI[2] c. 2000, where e.g. you might accidentally lose focus of the text field, and then the backspace button would navigate backwards[1] and lose everything you had typed up.

So my muscle memory is a lot of ctrl-a, c.

[1] A mistake that Chrome adopted afterward and didn't reverse until 2016: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/05/19/2041232/google-chro...

[2] Wasn't the only cause, of course. The request could fail as well.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#89

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

abakker wrote: post #66
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That reminds me of the old @bruised_blood comic: https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/926458505355235328

its really a perfect continuation of the Mark Twain, “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Really succinct fast code probably takes more time than verbose, slow code.

Brevity is difficult.

It takes me a lot longer to write small code, than big code (CTRL-C -> CTRL-V).

A big part of my refactoring, is looking for copy/pasta, and trying to do things like refine base classes or protocols, and whatnot.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#90

Post by CalChris »

> Programmers want to write fast apps. But the market doesn’t care.

That's partly because Moore's Law, Dennard Scaling, ... meant that our apps were going to get faster next year regardless. Intel had better marketing than Joe Programmer. So Intel got paid.

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