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"Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

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Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

#191
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm puzzled by this read on the situation. For starters, vanishingly few programmers work in a pure functional context. Secondly, performance characteristics of functional programming are absolutely not dogshit. There are specific languages/VMs/etc that have inherent performance issues, but that's not a universal truth. To claim that would be like pointing at Ruby and saying that imperative programming is slow. I thi…

JS developers have largely accepted the FP way of life, it’s why many JS apps are as slow as they are despite JS being actually quite fast.

I don’t think that has anything to do with FP honestly. I think it’s a combination of package culture, the language making it incredibly easy to write poorly performing code, and the massive scale and cultural/corporate tilt of the JS community resulting in a generally lower quality of developer.

Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

#192

Will AI tools help this or make it worse?

I assume we are talking about LLMs. Optimistically, it could help, given an appropriate, carefully crafted prompt. Realistically, most devs are lazy asses and as soon as AI gives them working code, they would move on to pumping out the next piece of crap that works. If we consider smarter AIs, that can actually understand code and logic, it could be much better. But here we should be more concerned about alignment of such AIs.

Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

#193

I'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.

But software developers do builds on that machine. I’ve quit workplaces because they wouldn’t upgrade my computer, in one case I just bought my own. It”s a chronic problem that software developers get a hand me down craptop from a salesman who couldn’t sell.
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