Software Disenchantment (2018)

Post by grenoire » Thu, Jan 02, 2020, 8:40 AM UTC

nneonneo wrote: post #357

S-E-P wrote: post #354

The linked Medium article (when talking about npm) was what I expected, but gives wonderful examples of just how bad it's gotten. For those who don't want to dig, one example was Ember.js, which has a dependency called "glimmer" which makes up ~95% of the code size. The author looked into glimmer and found that it had the entirety of the Encyclopedia of Britannica's "G" section to include a definition of "glimmer" in…

Not to burst your bubble but the linked Medium article you’re referring to is satire. Glimmer doesn’t actually pull in Britannica - it never has.

Post by dmitriid » Thu, Jan 02, 2020, 8:49 AM UTC

peter_d_sherman wrote: post #170

Excerpt: "An Android system with no apps takes up almost 6 GB. Just think for a second about how obscenely HUGE that number is. What’s in there, HD movies? I guess it’s basically code: kernel, drivers. Some string and resources too, sure, but those can’t be big. So, how many drivers do you need for a phone? Windows 95 was 30MB. Today we have web pages heavier than that! Windows 10 is 4GB, which is 133 times as big. B…

Post by username90 » Thu, Jan 02, 2020, 9:09 AM UTC

thanhhaimai wrote: post #45

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…

> "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. I'll prioritize the 0.005L per 100km car for sure. That means the car can be driven for all its expected lifetime (500k km) in a single tank of gas, fill…

Post by JMTQp8lwXL » Thu, Jan 02, 2020, 9:12 AM UTC

yibg wrote: post #349

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…

The stuff I write I don't think is that bloated, but like most things these days the stuff I write pulls in a bunch of dependencies which in turn pulls in their own dependencies. The result, pretty bloated software. Writing performant, clean, pure software is super appealing as a developer, so why don't I do something about the bloated software I write? I think a big part of it is it's hard to see the direct benefit…

Post by JMTQp8lwXL » Thu, Jan 02, 2020, 9:22 AM UTC

jiofih wrote: post #88

buboard wrote: post #68

He has a nice follow up which gets to the reasons why https://tonsky.me/blog/good-times-weak-men/ Another take: rewrites and rehashes tend to be bad because they are not exciting for programmers. Everything you re about to write is predictable, nothing looks Clearly better and it just feels forced. First versions of anything are exciting, the possibilities are endless, and even if the choices along the path are subop…

He hints at Electron in the end, but I think the real blame lies on React which has become standard in the past five years. Nobody has any fucking idea what’s going on in their react projects . I work with incredibly bright people and not a single one can explain accurately what happens when you press a button. On the way to solving UI consistency it actually made it impossible for anyone to reason about what’s happe…