This has been the story since the beginning unfortunately.
"Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
11–20 of 193 posts
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#12I 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.
I had very similar experience with npm. Especially when you need to merge all the security updates for the sdk and all their dependencies. I also prefer interacting with the api, if it is straightforward.
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#13I 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.
Doesn't it all boil down to economics in the end? When I worked at AOL, QA was very important/valued because our SW was shipped on CDs (I know, I know), and every bug/update cost us users because we had to download an update at modem speed. Now that I work on a web development team, bugs are easily fixed by an update. So who cares if there's a bug? We can just update the site. There are other costs, of course -- if we tolerate lots of bugs and tech debt, making development slower, we will evenually have our lunch eaten -- that's economics too.
Users/customers accept a certain level of quality, and it doesn't make short-term economic sense to provide more.
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#14I hate how much compute/energy is chewed up by anti-virus and 'defender' software (Malware ?)
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#15I'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.
Fully agree. Developers should regularly dog-food their software and they should have to do it on the lowest-spec machine/phone that the software claims to be supported on. Too many developers run their creations on their fully-maxxed-out development workstation beast machine, observe it runs fast enough, and call it a day.
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#16Software does more than it used to. Try using an old PC, say Windows 98. You will be amazed how little functionality there is. It didn't even come with full-screen desktop wallpaper.
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#17I'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 there some way to reliably simulate this, e.g. using a VM? It would be nice to have IDE, build tools etc. using all available speed while running the output as if it was on slower hardware.
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#18I'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 there some way to reliably simulate this, e.g. using a VM? It would be nice to have IDE, build tools etc. using all available speed while running the output as if it was on slower hardware.
Assign a single core to the VM, 8 GB of RAM. Surely you can also bandwidth limit the storage.
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#19No we have the cloud and everyone just uses the web. We don't need speed ;)
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#20I'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.
Sometimes developers and managers can't fix it.
(second-hand information) Android was at a smoothness disadvantage vs iOS for a long time, because it was never an organization level priority for devices to scroll at >= 60hz without stuttering. Then some executives went "why is scrolling so bad on our phones but not on Apple's?" and suddenly it became a priority.
I remember before the priorities changed, some of their graphics programmers were very frustrated that they didn't have the freedom to invest in fixing it.