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Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

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Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#321

Post by fingerlocks »

modeless wrote: post #309
cosmotic wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devil's advocate: you now get a lot of tooling for 'free', which used to cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.

The problem with this argument is that the tools for proprietary platforms are inferior to the cross-platform ones in many cases. VSCode is better than XCode or Android Studio. GCC and Clang are better than MSVC. We don't need platform lock-in to subsidize good tools because the best tools are unencumbered. I'd happily build iOS apps without XCode or any of Apple's frameworks to save the 30% fee. Heck, I'd do it even…

I don’t use Xcode, I develop in vim. You can run the deploy/signing step on the cli without launching Xcode.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#322

Post by test6554 »

alerighi wrote: post #64
stephc_int13 wrote: post #20

My opinion about this is that yes, we lost our way, and the reason is very simple, it is because we could. It was the path of least resistance, so we took it. Software has been freeriding on hardware improvements for a few decades, especially on web and desktop apps. Moore's law has been a blessing and a curse. The software you use today was written by people who learned their craft while this free-ride was still ful…

The thing that makes me crazy is that the thing that we do on computers are basically the same each year, yet software are more and more heavy. For example just in 2010 a Linux distribution with a DE just started did consume 100Mb of RAM, an optimized version 60Mb of RAM. I remember it perfectly. I had 2Gb of RAM and did not have even a swap partition. Now just a decade later, a computer with less than 8Gb of RAM is…

Back in my day websites didn't have "dark mode" and we liked it. We didn't trust the compiler to do our optimizations in the snow (both ways). etc.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#323

Post by rTX5CMRXIfFG »

shpx wrote: post #314

Web apps are much faster to install and update. 1) Your browser is always open, whereas you need to close your current app and open the app store app 2) Google Search is better at giving you what you want in the fewest number of keystrokes than any search from any other company including app store search boxes 3) installing a "web app" is one click after the google search results or if someone posts a link. As you mi…

Lol stop putting the web on a pedestal like we don’t have to go through hoops just to reject cookies

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#324

Post by tonymet »

giantrobot wrote: post #76
throwaway35777 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we don't teach or reward today is the behaviors and engineering process to write high quality code. A surprising number of inexperienced developers do the following: "once I get any working solution I should immediately open a PR" and let the senior engineers tell them what's wrong with it. When the big money leaves this field I hope there will be more pressure for people to adopt good engineering practices. I l…

The process you're describing is the exact thing you want to happen: junior developers are trying to learn to write better code. Why should they waste their time researching not their code base when they can instead learn off their code base from people experienced with it?

The entire debate is over which qualities count as "better". Even "readable" is subjective. Some people love Java with sentence-long variable names. Some love 1-letter vars. Some love 100-deep call stacks, some love flat code. Some love microservices, some love resident call-stacks.

Aesthetics matters.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#325

Post by StressedDev »

s1k3s wrote: post #6

I want to make native apps but Apple and Microsoft seem to be trying really hard to stop me. I have to buy developer accounts, buy certificates for signing binaries, share 30% of my revenue with them for barely any reason and so on. Not to mention the mess they've introduced in their APIs - especially Microsoft. So of course we choose the much simpler, much cheaper way of the web.

To be blunt, you do not have to create a developer account, sign binaries, or share 30% of your revenue with Microsoft. MS's API are not a mess in my opinion. You do have several options (traditional Win32, .NET, UWP, etc.). These options all work fairly well and are very flexible.

As for, Apple, I do not know but I suspect you can make Mac applications without a developer account. You need a developer account for iPhone. It's $99 a year the last time I looked. This is not a lot of money if you are serious about making an application.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#326

Post by thombat »

thombat wrote: post #320
bitwize wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you don't sign your binaries on Windows, Windows Defender will assume they're malware and silently delete them.

Nope. Or at least, never happened to me. This comment section is starting to read like a "Bad Times" virus warning https://web.archive.org/web/20060925013545/http://www.making...

And having re-read "Bad Times" for the first time in years, the "screw-up your VHS tracking" is a testament to its age.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#327

Post by boustrophedon »

Animats wrote: post #211
apantel wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ads are the real content from Medium’s perspective. The article is actually the medium by which the real content is delivered, like a train carrying dark passengers. The article is not what Medium cares about delivering to your browser, but the ads. And delivering the ads requires a lot of complexity.

The article is an ad: "*** provides uptime monitoring and flow-based monitoring for APIs." This is an important subject, thus it's one for which clickbait is generated. Size is a problem. I look at my Rust compiles scroll by, and wonder "why is that in there?". I managed to get tokio out, which took some effort. The whole "zbus" system was pulled in because the program asks if the user is in "dark mode". That brought…

I'm not sure if it's related, but I have the git branch in my PS1 and I've noticed that it's much slower to show a new prompt when inside very large repositories now, and I don't think that was the case previously.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#328

Post by worthless-trash »

fingerlocks wrote: post #315
wredue wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t have to do any of that for native apps either. What on earth is happening in this comment section?

Yeah, the only actual hurdle from Apple is the measly 8 bucks a month for a developer account. I would happily pay ten times that amount just to avoid the node_modules dumpster fire

And the hardware around it, that needs to be updated and managed.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#329

Post by tppiotrowski »

d357r0y3r wrote: post #191
tppiotrowski wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> share 30% of my revenue with them for barely any reason Does the App Store collect sales tax and remit on your behalf? If it does then I think it's worth it or face registering both in the EU and UK ($0 tax threshold) as well as 50 US states (once you hit the allowed limit) will take you a long time.

30% cut for handling taxes? That's wild.

You'd think so until you look into doing it yourself. It's more work than building a simple app.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#330

Post by tppiotrowski »

bdw5204 wrote: post #210
pc86 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you live in the US the only entity you need to collect sales tax for is the state you live in. Despite what they may say you are under no legal obligation to collect sales tax for the other 49 states, nor the EU or UK.

I'm pretty sure that was changed by South Dakota v. Wayfair[0]. Most states seem to only require you collect the tax if you have 200 shipments into the state or $100k in revenue because going after a small time out of state e-commerce business over a few dollars of tax probably wouldn't be worth it but a large firm in Delaware refusing to collect tax on shipments into California would probably be hearing from Califor…

> Every company selling goods and services to European customers needs to collect value-added tax (VAT), even if their business is not established in Europe.

https://stripe.com/guides/introduction-to-eu-vat-and-vat-oss

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