181–190 of 265 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Flutter looks promising for solving a lot of the platform conflict problems.
Except then you have to use Dart, or call into Dart from some other language. There are many people who dislike Dart or otherwise prefer to use other languages.
The renewed interest in C++ and other compiled languages is an indication of the need to get more efficient. Programmer skill will become more important in the future. But they won't be today's skills. I expect that programming in the future will be more about getting the AI to do what you want rather than writing code directly.
I’m already an AI you can pay to get a computer to do what you “want”; the problem is ‘what you want’ is so poorly specified, there’s no way to turn it into an actionable set of steps!
This is remarkably accurate for games as well. Insurgency: Sandstorm for example. I was full of hope when I learned it was being developed in Unreal Engine which supports large scale combat much better than Insurgency's source engine. Unfortunately when it came out if performed much worse than its predecessor. Working with these engines has become so easy you don't really have to 'think' anymore and can just keep throwing stuff in.
The major problem areas are those where it's economically "best" to do the computationally inefficient thing. The obvious example is the quick-to-build MVP, but many of the bigger problems come from platform conflicts. Because we have at least five different actively uncooperating operating system platforms, it's hard to build portable native apps - so people build electron apps instead. We also use the web browser a…
Turns out that it was already removed but slack was still displaying it.
⌘ + R (refresh page shortcut) solved it.. Electron might help devs getting something out quickly but all these layers have a cost
One of the best 2h practical course that I had was just write the fastest square matrix multiplication. You could use any language, any algorithm, just no libraries. The target was a 32 core CPU server (this was ~10 years ago). At 5000x5000 all the Java and Python attempts were running out of memory. In C, We tried some openmp, some optimized algorithm, but in the end the best trick was to flip one of the matrix so t…
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of code performing large matrix multiplications these days was written in Python and executed on GPUs by libraries like Tensorflow and PyTorch. With the right abstractions, programmers can be "lazy" and still get great performance.
I just don't buy this. I cut my teeth as a HPC programmer working with C and writing no-lock algorithms. There will always be a need for that, but realistically the vast majority of software being developed is simply not performance-critical. It's designed to work at human speed. Advances in language, compiler, and runtime implementations will continue to keep up with any growth in the need for performant application…
> It's designed to work at human speed. It would be great if most applications worked at human speed. Instead we have web applications taking 5 seconds to load what is basically 3 records from a small database.
I want to live in your alternate reality, because in ours anything under 45 seconds is a miracle.
One of the best 2h practical course that I had was just write the fastest square matrix multiplication. You could use any language, any algorithm, just no libraries. The target was a 32 core CPU server (this was ~10 years ago). At 5000x5000 all the Java and Python attempts were running out of memory. In C, We tried some openmp, some optimized algorithm, but in the end the best trick was to flip one of the matrix so t…
I just don't buy this. I cut my teeth as a HPC programmer working with C and writing no-lock algorithms. There will always be a need for that, but realistically the vast majority of software being developed is simply not performance-critical. It's designed to work at human speed. Advances in language, compiler, and runtime implementations will continue to keep up with any growth in the need for performant application…
> It's designed to work at human speed. It would be great if most applications worked at human speed. Instead we have web applications taking 5 seconds to load what is basically 3 records from a small database.
The major problem areas are those where it's economically "best" to do the computationally inefficient thing. The obvious example is the quick-to-build MVP, but many of the bigger problems come from platform conflicts. Because we have at least five different actively uncooperating operating system platforms, it's hard to build portable native apps - so people build electron apps instead. We also use the web browser a…
Electron anecdote : I joked with a coworker that they had left their "out of office" status icon on slack in order to work in peace. Turns out that it was already removed but slack was still displaying it. ⌘ + R (refresh page shortcut) solved it.. Electron might help devs getting something out quickly but all these layers have a cost