Look in the mirror.
You are describing yourself, because you chose convenience over having to look for better alternatives.
And there are plenty.
Why programmers choose convenience over performance?
11–20 of 25 posts
Re: Why programmers choose convenience over performance?
#12I think once the complexity goes up to a certain point, there is no way to fix performance by throwing more programmers to the caldron.
Re: Why programmers choose convenience over performance?
#13If there was a valid reason to write software that efficiently, besides idealism, I'm sure developers would do so. But there isn't in the vast majority of cases, so we don't. iow computing resources are cheaper than labor.
I'm working on a small web app right now inside a VM and it's consuming around 2.5 GB of ram (and I believe Firefox is taking 2 GB). It's i3wm, tmux, vim, zeal, and php. So theorically, I could work on a 4 GB computer easily. But we have people here hollering that 8GB is too low for a modern machine.
Buying a beefy computer for a developer is cheap, but forcing everyone using your software to default to a 16GB computer isn't. And that's why we get when consumer software takes more ram to run than Windows XP.
Re: Why programmers choose convenience over performance?
#14> Let’s not forget that Nasa managed to launch rockets to the moon with only 64kb of RAM. We're not in the rocket launching business. Desktop memory is cheap and nodejs/electron makes it easy to develop cross platform.
Tell that to the user that try to run Spotify, Teams, (Outlook Mail?), and other electron stuff. I don't think it's that much hassle to write a core and use FFI or RPC with each OS native platform UI (or use QT).
Re: Why programmers choose convenience over performance?
#15Cue Stanford complaining about 64 H100s…
Re: Why programmers choose convenience over performance?
#161. Convenience usually transfers to less development time, which means less cost. Unless the performance is so poor that it’s unacceptable to a majority of users, many companies are willing to ship less-performant software if it means saving on development time and cost. 2. There is a lot of software that is used because people must use them. If your workplace uses Microsoft Teams despite its problems, then you’re es…
Without sounding elitist I think number 3 is a big one. If you once learn how, writing decently performing software is often straightforward without taking any extra labour.
Re: Why programmers choose convenience over performance?
#17Look in the mirror. You are describing yourself, because you chose convenience over having to look for better alternatives. And there are plenty.
Agree. So your rust based terminal ("a modern, Rust-based terminal with AI built in"???) is resource hungry - go use xterm then? VSCode too heavy - have all the other lighter editors disappeared?
This strikes me as wanting the features but not the cost. Could the features have been implemented better? Maybe - but no-one's paying for that so enjoy your featureful, free, and bloated VSCode.
Re: Why programmers choose convenience over performance?
#18Convenience saves developers time, which is the most valuable resource in a company.
Re: Why programmers choose convenience over performance?
#19I think it's caused by the nature of how most companies scale their productivity up, which is by adding more people and creating more teams. As a result the codebase for any given product starts to reflect this organizational structure. For example, a bank app might have a team for user management, and another team for product management. Then in the bank app, the designers added one module for selecting products on…
I can resonate with this. We do well in a space with a commercial program. It's been under constant development for 27 years. It has never had more than 2 developers at a time (only 2 project leads).
This means the system is "coherent". Things are where you expect them to be, in code, and in the UI. it has scaled very well starting out for "small businesses" and today runs in big enterprises.
One benefit of this leanness is that there are very few meetings. When something is needed by sales, or there's a tricky design question, or hard programming, then a simple ad-hoc phone call moves things along.
That said, having 3 or 4 people going can be advantageous, but team-management goes up exponentially.
Re: Why programmers choose convenience over performance?
#20You mean why are programmers lazy? Oldest question in compsci my friend.
The answer is because it’s efficient.