"Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
1–10 of 193 posts
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#2I've been saying for a while now, that developers and their managers should use a low-spec machine, let's say the 5th-percentile of whatever their users are using in the field, at least one day a week. This might force some reprioritizing of performance and efficiency goals.
As long as devs spend their days with bugattis while writing software for corollas, this will continue to get worse.
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#3I feel like nobody really cares about optimization anymore. It's just "ship, ship, ship, move faster, ship." So there's a lot of tech-debt, a lot of unoptimized code, and a lot of "just make it work", at the expense of writing software that utilities the hardware properly.
On the flip side of that though, hardware has gotten fast enough, where this is possible.
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#4I recently switched an old PHP project from sending me emails directly via SMTP to using mailgun. At first I tried to use their SDK. It pulled in like a dozen dependencies. I gave up on that idea and replaced it with a simple curl call.
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#5It feels true but I don't think it actually is. Especially given the fact Wirth wrote it in 1995 which is practically the pinnacle of what most of us perceive as when software was actually fast.
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#6I've been saying for a while now, that developers and their managers should use a low-spec machine, let's say the 5th-percentile of whatever their users are using in the field, at least one day a week. This might force some reprioritizing of performance and efficiency goals. As long as devs spend their days with bugattis while writing software for corollas, this will continue to get worse.
Is it the devs who need to ride the Corollas? Or is it the managers and/or the testers?
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#7I've been saying for a while now, that developers and their managers should use a low-spec machine, let's say the 5th-percentile of whatever their users are using in the field, at least one day a week. This might force some reprioritizing of performance and efficiency goals. As long as devs spend their days with bugattis while writing software for corollas, this will continue to get worse.
If you'll still pay for the software I write, why should I care?
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#8I'm not convinced this is true and not just a popular argument.
Just today I've processed 4 TB of JSON data, in Python, on a desktop computer. That would be crazy to imagine 10 years ago. Yes, many cores, fast SSD, etc. Maybe it should be 20 TB if ultra optimized, but the capability advance is incredible.
Yes, apps maybe start slowly, but now everybody can easily edit HD video on their mid-range laptop.
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#9I wonder if everything becoming a saas has to do with that. Everyone has added a bunch of network hops to services that (probably) have to make a bunch of network hops.
It will be interesting to see if that changes in a post zero interest rate world. Will people do more locally in their programs instead of reaching out to third party saas to save money? Will performance be a value add in competitive niche markets?
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#10I've been saying for a while now, that developers and their managers should use a low-spec machine, let's say the 5th-percentile of whatever their users are using in the field, at least one day a week. This might force some reprioritizing of performance and efficiency goals. As long as devs spend their days with bugattis while writing software for corollas, this will continue to get worse.
I hate this for developers. I got to experience this first hand because I had a boss who thought like you.
Developers generally need to run a bunch of resource intensive tools to build the application in the first place, so an underpowered system will already be choking. It means their app will feel slow no matter what. So then when they run it and it's slow, they will shrug and say it's just slow because their system is slow.
There might be a case for specifically running testing on a slower machine, though.