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A Plea for Lean Software (1995)

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Re: A Plea for Lean Software (1995)

#91

Post by falling_myshkin »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #88
dasil003 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes you know what you need to build. 90% of the challenge in large scale development is nailing down requirements, especially when the problem space is too big for any individual to fully understand.

> This assumes you know what you need to build. This is what in my opinion senior programmers or project managers are for. If they are not capable of handling this task decently, these people simply are not (yet) ready for this role.

Young engineer here in charge of a project and feeling quite out of their depth, I agree with this. Currently no mentorship and it will take a couple months for a senior hire. Do you have any advice? What does a senior engineer love/hate to see when they come onto a project started by engineers earlier in their career? How can I be most helpful?

Re: A Plea for Lean Software (1995)

#92

Post by dist-epoch »

maccard wrote: post #83
dist-epoch wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just reflecting your thinking - somehow you feel that Postman/Slack/.... owe something to you. Pay them to do what you want, or stop using them. You feel entitled to use a $10K machine to compensate for slow IntelliJ for maximum productivity and convenience, yet deny others (Postman/Slack/...) using the most productive and convenient technology for them (Electron). And while continuing to use their convenient p…

> Pay them to do what you want, or stop using them. I've been a paying slack customer for a decade at this point. I pulled up my email, my support ticket for "slack is using more ram than visual studio" was in February 2015. I don't have the political sway over Salesforce to makthem make these sorts of decisions. > You feel entitled to use a $10K machine to compensate for slow... Youre doing it again. I don't feel en…

> I've been a paying slack customer for a decade at this point

$10/month is not what I meant by "paying them". I worked at a company where clients would routinely pay us $200K to implement a particular niche feature which was not on the roadmap. If they asked for a non-roadmap feature, yes, the ticket would be closed "not-planned".

Re: A Plea for Lean Software (1995)

#93

Post by jillesvangurp »

maccard wrote: post #45
jillesvangurp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit theoretical because no editors exist that are smaller that do all of what vs code does. And a lot of what it does relies heavily on the notion that it's running in a browser. So, just tossing that out won't fly since you kind of need it for at least some of the features. It's only when you subjectively remove all the features that you don't care about that it becomes doable to make smaller editors. And tha…

Back in 2014 my company switched from Skype to this hot new tool called Slack for messaging. On my £10,000 workstation with dual xeon processors, 64GB memory and a 1TB SSD, you know what was the second most resource intensive app after my c++ compiler, and above my IDE? Slack. We used to close our chat program to compile to save the 1GB memory it was using. > It's a bit theoretical because no editors exist that are s…

We're talking about developer tools here. Editors are aimed at developers. You can expect developers to have reasonably decent hardware. If you are working wit unreal like you say you do, you presumably aren't using a ten year old macbook air to do your work. That would be madness.

Anyway, end users care even less. The paying user variety typically has a newish computer (of the last five years or so). The rest are not a great revenue stream. But of course, if you develop for users stuck on really old crappy laptops, of course you are going to invest your precious time in making sure they get a great experience and make all sorts of compromises to ensure they do. But for the rest of the users, good enough is good enough. You'll see from your revenue/usage statistics what that is.

I find the people that whine the most about this topic are exactly those people you should expect to have decent hardware (i.e. developers). Either way, use things that are useful to you.

Spotify and Slack, Teams, etc. seem to be doing OK with user popularity for example and don't seem to be getting a lot of churn over their application performance. And of course a lot of this stuff is used on mobile as well. I've used both for the last ten years without much issues on modestly sized laptops. 16GB is more than enough for me running stuff like that, vs code, intellij, a bunch of docker things, and a few other bits and bobs.

People using MS Windows seem to get a particularly rough experience. That's why lots of developers prefer mac or linux based machines.

Re: A Plea for Lean Software (1995)

#94

Post by graemep »

dasil003 wrote: post #85
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You put a hundred developers on a project and you'll generously get twice the meaningful output of ten developers (but 50 times the LOC; as demanded by conway's law). Based on my job experience, this is rather an artifact of how software projects are (badly?) managed. Give each of the developers some small "hotspots" to work on (i.e. critical code fragment that is - hard to implement correctly and fast - which is c…

This assumes you know what you need to build. 90% of the challenge in large scale development is nailing down requirements, especially when the problem space is too big for any individual to fully understand.

Agreed. Also often true in small projects.

I think big projects are worse simply in proportion to their size. I once spent months with a client adding requirements when we were supposed to be doing UAT!

Re: A Plea for Lean Software (1995)

#95

Post by vidarh »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #90
vidarh wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next to nothing of what VS code does depends on it running in a browser other than to the extent VS Code has made it so. It's not special. If anything it's one of the most clunky editor I've used because it tries to shoehorn everything into a convoluted UI. It's because my time matters to me I avoid VS Code as much as possible. The problem with VS Code is not that it's too slow, or too memory hungry. It could use far…

Markdown and html, image, and other previews, documentation, connectivity, it's a lot more than you think. If you don't like it, use something else of course. But there are valid reasons for it being browser based and a lot of people choose to use it at this point.

None of which requires VS code itself to be browser based, and of which do not benefit much from using a browser.

A lot of people choosing to use it is besides the point being made, which is not that people won't use it, but that it could be a lot leaner without sacrificing functionality.

Re: A Plea for Lean Software (1995)

#96

Post by eropple »

glenstein wrote: post #69
hugryhoop wrote: post #5

He was calling 1995 text editors which used 4 MB of RAM incredibly bloated compared to the lean software of his youth which ran in 32 KB. Now we do the same, but we look at the text editors of 1995 which used 4 MB of RAM as incredibly efficient and well made, paragons of craftsmanship. Things never change, the old generation fights the new one and calls it stupid.

>Things never change, the old generation fights the new one and calls it stupid. I was with you until here, which I think is the wrong take. That is, this gets it exactly backwards. It's not just that every generation gets upset at the previous generation so let's all shrug and move on, it's that this is really a thing that is unfolding from one generation to the next. It seems like the reflex of oh well the previous…

> So one thing you could say is, well, every generation says that there were less strikeouts in third day. But there's actually data on this and..... it's true! Almost every decade, from the 1800s through every decade of the 1900s through now, strikeouts really have been going up year to year. And so that intergenerational commentary, well, it's describing a real thing that really is happening.

I agree with the factual observations in your post, but there's an additional bit here, and that there's qualitative value being assigned to what The Youths don't mind and The Olds protest. In baseball, the guys who strike out a lot but hit a ton of home runs create more runs, and therefore create more wins, than most base-hit machines (obvious outliers exist, but you get the idea). On my computer, VS Code does more things that benefit me than vim does (and the outlier here, I guess, would be "a lovingly crafted vim monstrosity that uses all the LSPs etc. designed for VS Code et al in the first place"--doable but not the happy path, etc.).

There's also (and IMO this is more in code than baseball) some kind of bizarre moral valence assigned, and that I don't even pretend to understand, but that's a different story.

Re: A Plea for Lean Software (1995)

#97

Post by GTP »

michaelt wrote: post #6

I've come to suspect the normal way large companies are organised makes performant software almost impossible. Features are celebrated and make money - whereas performance can be gradually salami-sliced away, with nobody advocating for it. If you can add a feature and it adds just 50ms to a 300ms pageload - it's unlikely anyone is going to block its release on performance grounds. And once the feature is released, th…

Your comment remebered me of the speed-up loop: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop

Re: A Plea for Lean Software (1995)

#98

Post by cxr »

dist-epoch wrote: post #92
maccard wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pay them to do what you want, or stop using them. I've been a paying slack customer for a decade at this point. I pulled up my email, my support ticket for "slack is using more ram than visual studio" was in February 2015. I don't have the political sway over Salesforce to makthem make these sorts of decisions. > You feel entitled to use a $10K machine to compensate for slow... Youre doing it again. I don't feel en…

> I've been a paying slack customer for a decade at this point $10/month is not what I meant by "paying them". I worked at a company where clients would routinely pay us $200K to implement a particular niche feature which was not on the roadmap. If they asked for a non-roadmap feature, yes, the ticket would be closed "not-planned".

You seem to be choosing to engage with your own least charitable inferences rather than what reflects your counterpart's actual position. Viz:

> the alternative option isn't there

> I don't feel entitled. I don't have a choice in my chat app

Your responses are predicated on the option being there and the person you're responding to is just not taking it. This despite the fact that his or her responses strongly suggest they would take it if it were there, but it's simply not an option.

Re: A Plea for Lean Software (1995)

#99

Post by funcDropShadow »

scotty79 wrote: post #74
glenstein wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Things never change, the old generation fights the new one and calls it stupid. I was with you until here, which I think is the wrong take. That is, this gets it exactly backwards. It's not just that every generation gets upset at the previous generation so let's all shrug and move on, it's that this is really a thing that is unfolding from one generation to the next. It seems like the reflex of oh well the previous…

There is real thing happening. But the dissatisfaction from that thing happening is what's the criticism is all about. And those are two separate things. Things changing might be real or not. But the dissatisfaction of older generation is constant for thousands of years.

> But the dissatisfaction of older generation is constant for thousands of years.

And there is no dissatisfaction of the younger generation? There is no, this is the old way let's do it differently because we are more clever by the young generation?

Re: A Plea for Lean Software (1995)

#100

Post by guappa »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #71
dist-epoch wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since your time is so valuable and you are obviously very upset about this, your company should pay Spotify to write a more efficient app. Or your company should buy you a new 96 core Threadripper 1 TB RAM system so that when you use Spotify/Slack/Postman it doesn't impact your productivity.

For me that wouldn't work, because the impact Slack has is not measured in time loss directly (or at least not only, since Slack is truly a laggy piece of crap), but instead in annoyance and feeling bad about using basically spyware on my system. Basically each interaction adds a bit of pain and questioning, why I am even doing this shit. Not GP, but they could buy me a 1024 core monster if it exists, it would still…

I have been running localslackirc (it's in debian) to access slack from IRC.

I still have to open it in the browser every once in a while, to search old threads or other stuff that is not supported. But day to day I can do everything in irc. There is also a weechat plugin afaik.

It's a bit annoying to configure the access but it seems the tokens never expire (or have not yet expired) so it shouldn't be too frequent for you either.

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