Did we lose our way in making efficient software?
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Did we lose our way in making efficient software?
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Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?
#2In the early 90s, I believe MS Word came on a few floppy disks and the main executable was 2MB. It ran fine on a 16Mhz 386 with a total of 2MB RAM (let that sink in!)
It did pretty much everything it does now, only lacked a grammar checker. (WordPerfect had one.)
Now we measure things in GB units. 1000X bigger, but what was gained?
We not only lost the way, we don’t even know the destination any more.
Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?
#3Remember the QNX demo floppy?
Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?
#4In the early 90s, I believe MS Word came on a few floppy disks and the main executable was 2MB. It ran fine on a 16Mhz 386 with a total of 2MB RAM (let that sink in!) It did pretty much everything it does now, only lacked a grammar checker. (WordPerfect had one.) Now we measure things in GB units. 1000X bigger, but what was gained? We not only lost the way, we don’t even know the destination any more.
Our docker file for running some ML code at work is 6GiB. That does not include the model files. What the fuck, Nvidia? Am I downloading thousands of permutations of generated code for things I’ll never use?
Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?
#5Yes because we promote blog posts on “idiomatic ruby” and “premature optimization is the root of all evil”. “Performance is less important than dev time”.
We used to have developers who took less time and wrote better code.
Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?
#6I want to make native apps but Apple and Microsoft seem to be trying really hard to stop me. I have to buy developer accounts, buy certificates for signing binaries, share 30% of my revenue with them for barely any reason and so on. Not to mention the mess they've introduced in their APIs - especially Microsoft. So of course we choose the much simpler, much cheaper way of the web.
Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?
#7Remember the QNX demo floppy?
Yup, that felt incredible even at the time, let alone now.
Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?
#8I think about this a lot, and the conclusion I've come to is that the market (simply meaning the popularity) rewards features and intuitive UI above everything else. I think we've been on this trajectory for some time: getting users with less and less actual computer literacy to do more and more with computers.
Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?
#9This just sounds like an inefficiency in Google Docs. Native software can also be inefficient, even if it's written in C or asm, if the data structures or algorithms used can't handle certain types of data well. Just in this case, the native software seems to be able to handle that file better.
Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?
#10In the early 90s, I believe MS Word came on a few floppy disks and the main executable was 2MB. It ran fine on a 16Mhz 386 with a total of 2MB RAM (let that sink in!) It did pretty much everything it does now, only lacked a grammar checker. (WordPerfect had one.) Now we measure things in GB units. 1000X bigger, but what was gained? We not only lost the way, we don’t even know the destination any more.
I completely agree. I believe it is still not too late to set a destination for the future. But, because of the hardware breakthroughs which are good, no one thinks about software efficiency anymore. They will add another GB/TB to the specs to avoid any bottlenecks.