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Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem

bowero.nl

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Re: Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem

#171

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

hyko wrote: post #165

Modern software is doing orders of magnitude more than the software of the past. The feature set of a word processor in 1980 is a rounding error compared to the 2020 word processor’s print dialog. The OP’s viewpoint is akin to claiming that aviation has not advanced beyond Kitty Hawk because modern aircraft are simply wasting fuel when they take to the skies. It doesn’t take into account the huge differences in the m…

I think you'd be surprised how few extra features Word in Office 365 has compared to WordStar 2000 considering the forty year gap. And also how poorly designed, inelegant, and - yes - pointlessly bloated Word feels in comparison.

The biggest differences are screen size - full document vs a few lines of text - and support for colours and outlining. Also, PDFs, which weren't a thing in the early 80s.

But the core features in WS2000 are a lot more than a "rounding error" compared to Word.

Re: Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem

#173

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

nl wrote: post #148
markbnj wrote: post #106

> 1995 was the year in which programmers stopped thinking about the quality of their programs. Oh, please. There are some good points in the article but that hyperbole was unnecessary. I was programming in 1995, and nobody stopped thinking about the quality of their software.

It's like they never actually ran Windows 95 and had the experience of people accepting your operating system crashing daily. It was much more reliable than Windows 3.1 after all (and to be fair to MS, was also more reliable than MacOS System 7 and ran faster than OS2). There's always been good software and bad software.

Windows particularly made terrible software acceptable. Windows really was an utterly unforgivable PoS compared to DR's Gem + TOS on the Atari and AmigaOS (multitasking!) on the Amiga - both of which were already around in the mid-80s.

It really took incredible hubris to sell Win95 as a huge step forward for the industry when it was so hugely inferior in quality to an OS that had been hacked together by a small team of best-in-world hardware and software designers ten years earlier.

But it did succeed in one area - which was doing a great job of lowering consumer expectations and making the most appalling carelessness and incompetence seem like a boon from the tech gods.

Re: Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem

#174

Post by soulofmischief »

evilos wrote: post #170
soulofmischief wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are completely missing their point. "For newer hardware" means slower . I remember how Windows 7 was so well-designed that it actually ran faster on my all of my old XP machines than XP did. It was a step up in performance, not a step down. In 2018 Microsoft disbanded the Windows team and moved engineering efforts to its cloud and AI teams. Windows 10 is on life support by engineers who aren't intimately familiar…

It was a re-org, those engineering teams just moved to be under CAI or ED. The people are still there.

The people are still there, but there's no organizational impetus to always use them, plus they have other duties now. The team being disbanded means a loss in product tightness and quality control.

Re: Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem

#176

Post by peter_d_sherman »

>"Wirth’s law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law"

[...]

>"Niklaus Wirth, the designer of Pascal, wrote an article in 1995:

About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage. (Modern program editors request 100 times that much!) An operating system had to manage with 8,000 bytes, and a compiler had to fit into 32 Kbytes, whereas their modern descendants require megabytes. Has all this inflated software become any faster? On the contrary. Were it not for a thousand times faster hardware, modern software would be utterly unusable.

Niklaus Wirth – A Plea for Lean Software"

[...]

>"Time pressure is probably the foremost reason behind the emergence of bulky software.

Niklaus Wirth – A Plea for Lean Software

And while that was true back in 1995, that is no longer the most important factor. We now have to deal with a much bigger problem: abstraction. Developers never built things from scratch, and that has never been a problem, but now they have also become lazy."

[...]

"The problem does not seem that big, but try to grasp what is happening here. In another tutorial that Nikola wrote, he built a simple todo-list. It works in your browser with HTML and Javascript. How many dependencies did he use? 13,000.

These numbers are insane, but this problem will only keep increasing. As new, very useful libraries keep being built, the number of dependencies per project will keep growing as well.

That means that the problem Niklaus was warning us about in 1995, only gets bigger over time."

Related: "The Law Of Leaky Abstractions" by Joel Spolsky: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...

Re: Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem

#177

Post by cmrdporcupine »

shash wrote: post #103
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am completely baffled by this quip. At speed of light in a vacuum, from New York to London is 19ms. That's the physical limit of what a network could ever hope to accomplish, but in reality in fiber it's apparently about 28ms. At 60fps we need to present a new set of pixels to the screen every 16ms. So in the time that a packet goes in one direction to Europe we could have presented almost two full frames of pixels…

Here’s his reasoning: https://superuser.com/a/419167 “ The bad performance on the Sony is due to poor software engineering. Some TV features, like motion interpolation, require buffering at least one frame, and may benefit from more. Other features, like floating menus, format conversions, content protection, and so on, could be implemented in a streaming manner, but the easy way out is to just buffer between each su…

Well, yes, I suspected it was something like this.

I'm well aware of this kind of bloating (guess I should have said something in my comment to avoid the downvotes...) but it still doesn't support the OP's comment.

Network latency is not only high, but there's literally nothing that can be done of it -- because of the speed of light!

(I am somewhat lucky to work on something where we can optimize away much of the crap you're talking about here, as we own the whole package.)

Re: Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem

#178

Post by badsectoracula »

cable2600 wrote: post #125
badsectoracula wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience what the switch to SSDs resulted into was Windows 10 becoming practically unusable on a mechanical HDD. Comparing how long the OS needs to start up, launch applications, etc on my laptop with Win10 vs a much older laptop with Win8 (the first and last time Microsoft bothered to optimize Windows the last decade) is night and day and that older laptop originally came with Vista! When i first installed W…

At Microcenter you can buy a house brand SSD hard drive with 128G on it for $58 and boot from that and store all your other files on a D:\ regular hard drive. That is how I set up my son's Windows 10 gaming rig.

Yeah, my main PC is all SSDs. I might replace my laptop's mechanical disk with an SSD but i use it very rarely. If anything i use my retro(ish) PC more often than my laptop so i'm thinking i might buy a cheap SSD for that instead :-P.

Re: Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem

#179

Post by badsectoracula »

rocqua wrote: post #155
zokula wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just know you can run a full Linux desktop experience on top of twenty-year-old spinning rust just fine. Micro$oft drooped the ball big time if one needs a ssd just to use a OS.

they optimized for current hardware, sacrificing some performance on outdated hardware. I'd rather windows uses my SSD to the fullest, than that it makes concessions to spinning disks.

How is Windows using SSD to its fullest? All it seems to be doing is taking advantage of the greater speed to perform more I/O that it didn't do before which negates any performance improvements the SSD brings.

Re: Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem

#180

Post by Barrin92 »

mabbo wrote: post #92

Software speed is a usability feature, and usability is a subset of economic value. It turns out, people are perfectly happy to put up with slightly slower software for all of the other benefits we get from modern software: rapid development, rapid deployability, ease of code comprehension, and more. When users complain about slow software enough to buy a different product (in whatever variation of 'buy' that may be)…

>people are perfectly happy to put up with slightly slower software for all of the other benefits we get from modern software

I don't think this is true. I think this is more of a 'boiling frog' situation. Increase the temperature one degree at a time and it won't jump out of the pot.

Every individual piece of software slowly eating up more resources is something the user barely notices or doesn't even attribute to the software in question, but give it a few years and everything grinds to a halt, and people very much dislike this, hence the infamous 'Windows rot' that everyone has suffered from at one point of their lives.

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