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A Plea for Lean Software (1995)

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Re: A Plea for Lean Software (1995)

#121

Post by NL807 »

ZaoLahma wrote: post #87
NL807 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you can add a feature and it adds just 50ms to a 300ms pageload - it's unlikely anyone is going to block its release on performance grounds. And once the feature is released, there's no removing it. Unfortunately this is happening, because compute power is cheap these days. It allows programmers to be lazy, take short cuts and not think about good software architecture. There is no economic incentive to optimise,…

> It allows programmers to be lazy, take short cuts and not think about good software architecture. I think it has little to do with laziness, and more to do with the taboo of reinventing wheels. If there's a very generic and very broad solution to your very specific and very narrow problem, you're encouraged to use (or invent!) the very generic and very broad solution. This leads to everything being abstracted to th…

I do believe laziness is a big part of it. Because laziness IS about economics - in this case, personal economics. Why expend effort when you can get away with less and get rewarded the same?

Re: A Plea for Lean Software (1995)

#122

Post by zelphirkalt »

guappa wrote: post #100
zelphirkalt wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me that wouldn't work, because the impact Slack has is not measured in time loss directly (or at least not only, since Slack is truly a laggy piece of crap), but instead in annoyance and feeling bad about using basically spyware on my system. Basically each interaction adds a bit of pain and questioning, why I am even doing this shit. Not GP, but they could buy me a 1024 core monster if it exists, it would still…

I have been running localslackirc (it's in debian) to access slack from IRC. I still have to open it in the browser every once in a while, to search old threads or other stuff that is not supported. But day to day I can do everything in irc. There is also a weechat plugin afaik. It's a bit annoying to configure the access but it seems the tokens never expire (or have not yet expired) so it shouldn't be too frequent f…

Thanks, I might try that soon.

Re: A Plea for Lean Software (1995)

#123

Post by cxr »

dist-epoch wrote: post #105
cxr wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be choosing to engage with your own least charitable inferences rather than what reflects your counterpart's actual position. Viz: > the alternative option isn't there > I don't feel entitled. I don't have a choice in my chat app Your responses are predicated on the option being there and the person you're responding to is just not taking it. This despite the fact that his or her responses strongly sugges…

There is always an option. Threaten your employer you'll leave if they make you use Slack, quit programming and become a farmer who touches grass every day. All this Electron app complaining reads like First-World Problems(TM).

You know we can read back the comments that were posted in this thread and check your response against the context, right? You just moved the goalposts from being willing to pay for the product that would need to be changed to address the complaints, to refusing to use the software complained about.

Re: A Plea for Lean Software (1995)

#124

Post by cxr »

Dwedit wrote: post #53
baal80spam wrote: post #8

Electron entered the chat.

I blame Firefox and other web browsers which deny loading JS files if your page was loaded from file://. If you could simply run an HTML file from your hard drive and have a fully functional web application, you wouldn't need Electron.

Not sure what you're referring to. Files opened from disk in Firefox aren't forbidden from running JS.

Re: A Plea for Lean Software (1995)

#125

Post by dist-epoch »

cxr wrote: post #123
dist-epoch wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is always an option. Threaten your employer you'll leave if they make you use Slack, quit programming and become a farmer who touches grass every day. All this Electron app complaining reads like First-World Problems(TM).

You know we can read back the comments that were posted in this thread and check your response against the context, right? You just moved the goalposts from being willing to pay for the product that would need to be changed to address the complaints, to refusing to use the software complained about.

I'm not moving anything. Parent obviously doesn't want to pay the millions Slack would probably ask to make it "efficient" (whatever that means), you say parent has no alternative, I'm providing alternatives.

Or one can go back complaining "how the world is cruel, people are mean and greedy, I'm a good and misunderstood person which writes the most efficient and user considering software, unlike the evil people at Slack"

Re: A Plea for Lean Software (1995)

#126

Post by cxr »

dist-epoch wrote: post #125
cxr wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know we can read back the comments that were posted in this thread and check your response against the context, right? You just moved the goalposts from being willing to pay for the product that would need to be changed to address the complaints, to refusing to use the software complained about.

I'm not moving anything. Parent obviously doesn't want to pay the millions Slack would probably ask to make it "efficient" (whatever that means), you say parent has no alternative, I'm providing alternatives. Or one can go back complaining "how the world is cruel, people are mean and greedy, I'm a good and misunderstood person which writes the most efficient and user considering software, unlike the evil people at Sl…

You're just shamelessly making up strawman non-quotes now.

Re: A Plea for Lean Software (1995)

#127

Post by glenstein »

eropple wrote: post #96
glenstein wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Things never change, the old generation fights the new one and calls it stupid. I was with you until here, which I think is the wrong take. That is, this gets it exactly backwards. It's not just that every generation gets upset at the previous generation so let's all shrug and move on, it's that this is really a thing that is unfolding from one generation to the next. It seems like the reflex of oh well the previous…

> So one thing you could say is, well, every generation says that there were less strikeouts in third day. But there's actually data on this and..... it's true! Almost every decade, from the 1800s through every decade of the 1900s through now, strikeouts really have been going up year to year. And so that intergenerational commentary, well, it's describing a real thing that really is happening. I agree with the factu…

>I agree with the factual observations in your post, but there's an additional bit here, and that there's qualitative value being assigned to what The Youths don't mind and The Olds protest.

A few things here. I want the main center of gravity in the point that I'm making to be a way of approaching intergenerational reports of a given phenomenon, namely that they shouldn't just be dismissed as a function of old age or a function of changing perspective. After that point, pretty much any point you want to make is fair game as far as I'm concerned. In the case of baseball, there are positives and negatives. It clearly seems to be a positive trade-off for hitters who are choosing which style to take. I suppose there's another consideration at a higher level as to whether it benefits the game itself. So that can go either way in my opinion depending on what's important.

I tried at the end to throw in some other examples, shortening of attention spans, and environmental degradation. I think in those cases it's clear that there's something negative going on. But in general we don't have to agree with the value judgment if it's negative, but I think the positive or negative value judgments is an independent thing from the phenomenon of multiple generations attesting to some thing happening.

Re: A Plea for Lean Software (1995)

#128

Post by glenstein »

scotty79 wrote: post #74
glenstein wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Things never change, the old generation fights the new one and calls it stupid. I was with you until here, which I think is the wrong take. That is, this gets it exactly backwards. It's not just that every generation gets upset at the previous generation so let's all shrug and move on, it's that this is really a thing that is unfolding from one generation to the next. It seems like the reflex of oh well the previous…

There is real thing happening. But the dissatisfaction from that thing happening is what's the criticism is all about. And those are two separate things. Things changing might be real or not. But the dissatisfaction of older generation is constant for thousands of years.

>But the dissatisfaction from that thing happening is what's the criticism is all about.

The argument seems to imply that the dissatisfaction would be there regardless of the circumstances. But the point I'm making is that the dissatisfaction can be understood as meaningful and not as just a generalized disposition that's a natural consequence of getting old.

And whether or not I'm right on that, the devil is in the details there, and it's going to depend on a case-by-case basis. But it won't do just to say well the older generation is going to complain no matter what, because that doesn't credit them with the possibility of complaining for a legitimate reason.

Re: A Plea for Lean Software (1995)

#129

Post by glenstein »

dist-epoch wrote: post #103
glenstein wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Things never change, the old generation fights the new one and calls it stupid. I was with you until here, which I think is the wrong take. That is, this gets it exactly backwards. It's not just that every generation gets upset at the previous generation so let's all shrug and move on, it's that this is really a thing that is unfolding from one generation to the next. It seems like the reflex of oh well the previous…

You are focusing on the generational trends, I was focusing on the individual. Tell a kid learning to program today "you should program in assembly because it's efficient, like I did back in my days". Kid looks around and sees it would take him 3 days to implement a hello world in assembly, but only 3 seconds to do it in Python. He has a 16 core computer with 64 GB of RAM. Both hello worlds run instantly. So how does…

I'm not sure I would agree that the point I'm making cleanly transposes onto the details that you've selected.

For one, I think the accepted premise in this conversation up till now was that there is a real issue with software bloat. And you've switched that detail out for a different one where we assume no discernible bloat or difference in performance as time passes.

I also don't think that I understand what's going on in the pivot from generational examples to individual ones. I feel like at least the comment I replied to was pretty clearly about generational trends. But on another level I think that the upshot is the same regardless of whether your surveying that disagreement at a general level versus its equivalent manifestation at an individual level.

I think the upshot would be the same in each case as long as you keep all the details the same, and I think somewhere in the transposition from the general to the individual and agreed assumption about bloat and underperformance of software, as well as some implications about what that means about prevailing assumptions and practices surrounding software development, got lost in the translation from one to the other.

Re: A Plea for Lean Software (1995)

#130

Post by Dwedit »

cxr wrote: post #124
Dwedit wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I blame Firefox and other web browsers which deny loading JS files if your page was loaded from file://. If you could simply run an HTML file from your hard drive and have a fully functional web application, you wouldn't need Electron.

Not sure what you're referring to. Files opened from disk in Firefox aren't forbidden from running JS.

Files opened from disk can run JS. But you can't do without getting a cross-origin error, even if it's in the same directory. So any kind of code organization at all is prohibited.
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