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Is software abstraction killing civilization? (2021)

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Re: Is software abstraction killing civilization? (2021)

#111

Post by TheMode »

gmueckl wrote: post #108
TheMode wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe this is the root cause, computers got faster, and software got quicker to the state of "run good enough". I'm calling Wirth's law on it. "Clean code" is indeed often a bad idea, but you are overestimating the impact. Even software written by people caring very much about performance consume way more than it theoretically should. Plus, if this was that simple, people would have already rewritten all th…

The free market is preventing technical solutions. People generally buy based on features first and everything else second. This allows for a precarious situation in software market: the company producing the most bloat the fastest wins the biggest market share and sees no need to invest in proper fixes. Everyone that cares about software quality too much gets outcompeted almost immediately. And since software can be…

It doesn't have to come from the free market, FOSS is hardly exempt of awfully slow/unstable software. Nobody figured out yet how to make writing good software the default/path-of-least-resistance.

Re: Is software abstraction killing civilization? (2021)

#112

Post by jcranmer »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #59
mjr00 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He’s released two games which barely qualify as games. Everyone's entitled to an opinion, but it's worth pointing out that Braid is not only widely considered one of the best games ever made[0], its success was also instrumental in the explosion of indie games in the late 00s/10s. The Witness didn't quite reach the same heights, but it got an 87 on Metacritic and was a financial success. Even if it's only two games…

> Braid is not only widely considered one of the best games ever made[0] The source here is a wikipedia article containing "A list of video games that multiple have considered to be among the best of all time" I don't know anyone who is into gaming that takes the opinions of "video game journalists or magazines" seriously anymore. They are so obviously just a marketing extension of the videogame industry that you can…

> Look at recent developments with Dragon Age Inquisition. Reviewers gave it great scores, but it flopped hard enough that Bioware had huge layoffs [0]

First off, it's Dragon Age: Veilguard, not Dragon Age: Inquisition.

Second off, it's had a better release (in terms of sales X days from launch) than literally every other Dragon Age came to date.

While it's true that it underperformed expectations, that's more because the expectations were ludicrous to begin with, and the actual performance can hardly be called a flop.

Re: Is software abstraction killing civilization? (2021)

#113

Post by wruza »

rglover wrote: post #74
Swizec wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They think that React is itself what browsers render My kingdom for native JSX in the browser. That would be awesome . Something similar to how we have WebGL and Canvas, but for pure JavaScript UI without the extra step of DOM reconciliation. There’s a small (and growing) cohort of people working on rendering React Native directly on canvas or webgl (I think). Supposedly gives you super smooth UX, but I haven’t kno…

The lengths that some JS developers go to avoid writing HTML is unbelievable. JSX is one of those technologies that was clever for what it was, but should have never caught on. Adding another layer of abstraction on top of JSX is the type of behavior at the root of the civilizational collapse argument. Just because you can doesn't mean you should .

Mind you, I’m a former x86 asm and C guy who avoids writing HTML. Web 1 state transfers never made sense to me. It just doesn’t click, I don’t think this way and refuse to do so in the name of not sure what.

And while I despise react for its architectural delusions, I still use a js framework to render my webapps. I also don’t see any bloat or something, they all render instantly on both my pc and my phone.

Re: Is software abstraction killing civilization? (2021)

#114

Post by TheMode »

saagarjha wrote: post #106
TheMode wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your opinion on the cause and the solution?

I think it's like asking why poverty exists. There's no one, easy answer. We have a lot of difference forces, many of them market or demand or incentives that cause software to be slow. Fixing this will require concerted effort, rewards for making things that are fast, and some sort of accounting for the externalities. Same as any other complex problem.

Aren't you agreeing with Casey by saying this is an effort/cultural problem? He also does say that fast software can sell better.

Re: Is software abstraction killing civilization? (2021)

#115

Post by [deleted] »

jcranmer wrote: post #112
bluefirebrand wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Braid is not only widely considered one of the best games ever made[0] The source here is a wikipedia article containing "A list of video games that multiple have considered to be among the best of all time" I don't know anyone who is into gaming that takes the opinions of "video game journalists or magazines" seriously anymore. They are so obviously just a marketing extension of the videogame industry that you can…

> Look at recent developments with Dragon Age Inquisition. Reviewers gave it great scores, but it flopped hard enough that Bioware had huge layoffs [0] First off, it's Dragon Age: Veilguard, not Dragon Age: Inquisition. Second off, it's had a better release (in terms of sales X days from launch) than literally every other Dragon Age came to date. While it's true that it underperformed expectations, that's more becaus…

[deleted]

Re: Is software abstraction killing civilization? (2021)

#116

Post by ninetyninenine »

scarface_74 wrote: post #103
sampullman wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't discount MediaTek, and four years is an exaggeration.

My bad - only 3 years. The fastest Samsung is around iPhone 12 and iPhone 13. https://browser.geekbench.com/mobile-benchmarks MediaTek is definitely not releasing high end chips. For desktop ARM, the only ones that come close are Qualcomm’s chip

TMSC realizes the designs. They only aren't designing because they choose not to. Basically everything you see around you Asia does better. I think the last thing we have is military technology and passenger planes.

As for software, we're only slightly better than asia.

Re: Is software abstraction killing civilization? (2021)

#117

Post by jcranmer »

jiggawatts wrote: post #72
jakelazaroff wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I only spoke Arabic or Russian or Chinese, could I write words in my language on those ancient developer tools? Or would I be limited to ASCII characters? If I were blind, could the computer read the interface out to me as I navigated around? If I had motor issues, could I use an assistive device to move my cursor? I'm not saying this excuses everything, but it's easy to point at complexity and say "look how much…

> If I only spoke Arabic or Russian or Chinese, could I write words in my language on those ancient developer tools? For relevant cases, YES! NT4 was fully Unicode and supported multiple languages simultaneously, including in the dev tools. Windows and all associated Microsoft software (including VS) has had surprisingly good support for this even back in the late 1990s, possibly earlier. I remember seeing in 2001 an…

Your comment indicates a pretty poor understanding of why multilingual text rendering is a lot harder than it was in the early 90s. Back then, to display some text on the screen, the steps were: for each character (=byte), use the index to select a small bitmap from a dense array, copy that bitmap to the appropriate position on the screen, advance.

But modern font rendering is: for a span of bytes, first look up which font is going to provide those characters (since fonts aren't expected to contain all of them!). Then run a small program to convert those bytes into a glyph index. The glyph index points to a vector image that needs to be rendered. Next, run a few more small programs to adjust the rendered glyph for its surrounding text (which influences things like kerning spacing) or the characteristics of its display. And then move on to the next character, where you get to repeat the same process again. And if you've got rich text, all of this stuff can get screwy in the middle of the process: https://faultlore.com/blah/text-hates-you/

Indic text rendering, for example, never worked until the mid-2000s, and there's even more complex text rendering scenarios that still aren't fully supported (hello Egyptian hieroglyphs!).

Re: Is software abstraction killing civilization? (2021)

#118

Post by userbinator »

Abstraction isn't the problem, overabstraction is; and I suspect the reason the latter is so common is because people don't actually understand why and when abstraction is useful (and likewise, when it isn't), so they blindly apply it whenever they can, with the misguided notion that since abstraction is somehow a good thing, the more abstract something is, the better it is.

Re: Is software abstraction killing civilization? (2021)

#119

Post by userbinator »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #13

I teach the systems class at Montana State, where we go from transistors up to a real computing system, and I have students that don't understand what a file system really is when they start my class I agree that blow is wrong on some details, but I really think we need to be thinking hard around a NAND-to-Tetris style education that starts in high school for our technical students. I use "outdated" models like Littl…

but I really think we need to be thinking hard around a NAND-to-Tetris style education that starts in high school for our technical students.

I suggest Petzold's Code as a good example of a book that's great at teaching the bottom-up approach.

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