Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Software Disenchantment (2018)

tonsky.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 504 posts

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#251

Post by Wowfunhappy »

UweSchmidt wrote: post #167
jupp0r wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear that argument very frequently and I don’t buy it. Think about all the gas that is saved because people don’t have to drive to the library, all the plane trips saved by video conferencing, all the photo film, all the sheets of paper in file cabinets, all the letters being sent as emails, all the mail order catalogues, ... you get the idea. Does anybody know of a comprehensive study on this?

If websites and business software were as lean as they could be, most computers could have amazingly weak, low-powered processors. I'm quite disenchanted with software myself. It takes way too long to open any program, for this JIRA ticket to properly display. One thing that has improved was boot times, I seem to remember that Windows 7 was quite a bit faster than XP. Maybe someone in upper management wanted it to be…

> One thing that has improved was boot times, I seem to remember that Windows 7 was quite a bit faster than XP. Maybe someone in upper management wanted it to be as fast as MacOS? So speed IS possible, if it is prioritized.

I seem to remember boot times being a frequent topic of discussion the early 2000s, because people turned off their computers.

In a way, this is a great little microcosm of the problem. Just fix habits instead of fixing the software.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#252

Post by detaro »

buzzkillington wrote: post #217
rogerdb wrote: post #20

> Would you buy a car if it eats 100 liters per 100 kilometers? How about 1000 liters? I think the analogy here is backwards. The better question is "how much would you prioritize a car that used only 0.05 liters per 100km over one that used 0.5? What about one that used only 0.005L?". I'd say that at that point, other factors like comfort, performance, base price, etc. become (relatively) much more important. If bas…

RTFA: >And build times? Nobody thinks compiler that works minutes or even hours is a problem. What happened to “programmer’s time is more important”? Almost all compilers, pre- and post-processors add significant, sometimes disastrous time tax to your build without providing proportionally substantial benefits.

Complaints about slow compilers or praise for toolchains being faster than others are very common, so I don't see how "nobody thinks" that.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#253

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

Lots of moving parts.

I am a dependency skeptic. I think that you need them to do big stuff, but should probably avoid them for small stuff.

High-quality dependencies can have a drastic impact on the quality of your software, but so can low-quality dependencies.

I think we are at the tail-end of a "wild west" of dependencies.

When the dust settles, there will be a few really good, usable and stable dependencies, and a charnel pit, filled with the corpses of all the crap dependencies, and, unfortunately, the software that depended on them.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#254

Post by detaro »

phillipcarter wrote: post #220

A coworker of mine explained his belief that professional software development is an inherently economic activity. This was clarified by saying that the amount of imperfections, performance problems, and bugs in a piece of software is not reflective of the software nor its writers, but what most end users ultimately care about. Whenever I read posts like Software Disenchantment, I find myself agreeing with that philo…

That assumes end users can make informed decisions about the software they use, and have free choice to choose a less-buggy option if they just preferred that. Neither of which is true in many cases.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#255

Post by huhtenberg »

jmpeax wrote: post #34

> Jonathan Blow has a language he alone develops for his game that can compile 500k lines per second on his laptop. That’s cold compile, no intermediate caching, no incremental builds. You don’t have to be a genius to write fast programs. The guy is most definitely at least a genius.

It really all depends on the language grammar. TurboPascal had comparable speeds on i386 machines back in the early 90s.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#257

Post by 4AoZqrH2fsk5UB »

megous wrote: post #43

I was in Rome recently, and google maps were basically unusable on EDGE (dsepite pre-downloading the area before the trip). We'd wait a minute (or more) for a timetable of a bus stop and a route of the bus to be show on the map. Try planning a route in an unfamiliar area with this slow an UI when you are standing outside and there's no place to sit and rest, and you need to click around on a bunch of stops just to se…

I agree with your general point, but in this particular case bandwidth is muddying the waters. 2g tech has less bandwidth dedicated to it now than it did years ago, so your kbps is lower now than it would have been when using 2g in the past.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#258

Post by isodude »

ibdknox wrote: post #98
iamwil wrote: post #8

I agree it's all slower and sucks. But I don't think it's solely a technical problem. 1/ What didn't seem to get mentioned was the speed to market. It's far worse to build the right thing no one wants, than to build the crappy thing that some people want a lot. As a result, it makes sense for people to leverage electron--but it has consequences for users down the line. 2/ Because we deal with orders of magnitude with…

I might strengthen your argument even more and say it's largely a non-technical problem. We have had the tools necessary to build good software for a long time. As others have pointed out, I think a lot of this comes down to incentives and the fact that no one has demonstrated the tradeoff in a compelling way so far. I find it really interesting that no one in the future of programming/coding community has been able…

I think you will see great change if you were to look at the personalities around one opportunity.

Because it's never problems really, it's perceived that way though.

A certain challange needs a specific set of personalities to solve it. That's the real puzzle.

Great engineers will never be able to solve things properly unlessed given the chance by those who control the surroundings.

We seek how we should develop, what method should be used, is it agile or is it lean? But maybe the problem starts earlier and focusing on exactly what methods and tools to use we miss out on the most simplest solution even beginners can see.

For example I am an architect, I tend to not touch the economics in a project. It's better fitted for other persons.

While not having read much about team based development I do want to be directed to well read literature about it. Maybe it's better called social programming, just another label of what we really do.

The one I miss the most at work is my wife. She clearly is the best reverse of me and makes me perform 1000x better. I find that very funny since she does not care about IT at all.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#260

Post by schwartzworld »

megous wrote: post #43

I was in Rome recently, and google maps were basically unusable on EDGE (dsepite pre-downloading the area before the trip). We'd wait a minute (or more) for a timetable of a bus stop and a route of the bus to be show on the map. Try planning a route in an unfamiliar area with this slow an UI when you are standing outside and there's no place to sit and rest, and you need to click around on a bunch of stops just to se…

Is making something fast enough to be usable even considered "optimization" at that point?
Post reply on HN