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Software Disenchantment (2018)

tonsky.me

371–380 of 504 posts

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#371
> Modern text editors have higher latency than 42-year-old Emacs. Text editors! What can be simpler? On each keystroke, all you have to do is update a tiny rectangular region and modern text editors can’t do that in 16ms. It’s a lot of time.

because we are going to make editors using JAVASCRIPT, which was never meant to be used this way

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#372
post #276

Performance is one thing, but I'm really just struck by how often I run into things that are completely broken or barely working for extended periods of time. As I write this, I've been trying to get my Amazon seller account reactivated for more than a year, because their reactivation process is just... broken. Clicking any of the buttons, including the ones to contact customer support just take you back to the same…

I have a feeling however that this is in fact not broken but working exactly as intended. Corporate dark pattern just to gently "discourage" problem customers from contacting them.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#373
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…

> If basic computer operations like loading a webpage took minutes rather than seconds...

Wait, are you implying they don't ? What world do you live in, and how do I join?

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#374
post #95
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Combining these two is only a non-issue with unlimited resources. Otherwise it's a tradeoff if you add constraints like cost, effort, time to market, and so on...

Windows does it. And despite that, versions like win 7 were pretty fast

>Windows does it.

Yeah, didn't say it's impossible. I said it's a tradeoff.

Windows does it and pays for it with slower releases, more engineers, bugs, strange interaction between old and new, several layers of UI and API code for devs to decode and for users to be confused with, less ability to move to new paradigms (why would devs bother if the old work), 2 versions of libs loaded (32/64 bit), and several other ways besides...

E.g. I've stopped using Windows for a decade or so, but I read of the 3 (4?) settings panels it has, the modern, the Vista style, the XP style, and so on, with some options in one, the others in the other (if you click some "advanced" menu, etc).

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#376
post #276

Performance is one thing, but I'm really just struck by how often I run into things that are completely broken or barely working for extended periods of time. As I write this, I've been trying to get my Amazon seller account reactivated for more than a year, because their reactivation process is just... broken. Clicking any of the buttons, including the ones to contact customer support just take you back to the same…

I'd love to see a software-industry-wide quality manifesto. The tenets could include things like: * Measure whether the service you provide is actually working the way your customers expect. (Not just "did my server send back an http 200 response", not just "did my load balancer send back an http 200", not just "did my UI record that it handled some data", but actually measure: did this thing do what users expect? Ho…

You might be interested in Software Craftsmanship [0] manifesto. There are many communities and initiatives around the world gathering folks with the interest in producing high-quality software. From the few of the folks I have been working with that are involved in SC, I can definitely recommend the movement and so I'm also exploring options in joining some local meet-ups and/or events.

[0] http://manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.org/

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#378

> How is that ok? Probably because a browser like FF has the goal to load and display arbitrary dynamic content in realtime like a reddit infinite scroll with various 4k videos and ad bullshit, whereas the game has the goal to render a known, tested number of pre-downloaded assets in realtime. Also on shitty pages the goal is different-- load a bunch of arbitrary adware programs and content that the user doesn't want…

I'm both a web developer and a game developer, and this comparison doesn't ring true at all. Games usually have tons of arbitrary dynamic content to display in realtime. Minecraft will load about 9 million blocks around your character plus handle mobs, pathfinding, lighting, etc. Reddit infinite scroll loads a sequence of text, images, and videos. Multiplayer games have such tight latency and bandwidth targets that game developers routinely do optimizations web developers wouldn't even consider.

As a web developer, sending an 8 KB JSON response is no problem. That's nice and light. In a networked action game, that's absurd. First, (hypothetical network programmer talking here) we're going to use UDP and write our own network layer on top of it to provide reliability and ordering for packets when we need it. We're going to define a compact binary format. Your character's position takes 96 bits in memory (float x, y, z); we'll start by reducing that to 18 bits per component, and we'll drop the z if you haven't jumped. Then we'll delta compress them vs the previous frame. Etc.

Really, what's happening is things are getting optimized as much as they need to be. If your game is running at 10 fps, it's going to get optimized. When it's hitting 60+ fps on all target platforms, developers stop optimizing, even if it could potentially be faster. Same for Reddit; it's fast enough for most users.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#379

From a Reddit comment: > While I do share the general sentiment, I do feel the need to point out that this exact page, a blog entry consisting mostly of just text, is also half the size of Windows 95 on my computer and includes 6MB of javascript, which is more code than there was in Linux 1.0. Linux at that point already contained drivers for various network interface controllers, hard drives, tape drives, disk drive…

[deleted]

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#380
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if webdev is going to go through all the iterations of GUI development ... oh boy , there are decades of frameworks ahead

It's just the underlying model that is similar, but React is pretty good at abstracting all that (unlike Win32). When it comes to developer experience I'd say that React and company are ahead of most desktop UI technologies, and has inspired others (Flutter, SwiftUI).

So where's the RAD React tooling? Is that a thing yet?
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