Software disenchantment
tonsky.me
Software disenchantment
1–10 of 98 posts
Re: Software disenchantment
#2People won't pay for efficiency. People buy solutions to their problems (features), not efficiency.
If it needs to be efficient, it will be (the games example).
The death of Moore's Law may rejuvenate efficient software.
BTW If you use old unix tools on a phone, it's super fast (in a terminal emulator like http://termux.com).
Sadly, the idea of abstractions enabling you to think better (like Alan Kay's point of view is worth 80 IQ points and maybe Jobs' bicycle for the mind) doesn't seem to work, at least for software abstractions. It's far more work than can be justified - more appropriate for pure research (which is instead preoccupied things like esoteric type systems with nice mathematical properties).
Re: Software disenchantment
#3I agree with the author.
Often I find it refreshing to step away from the absurdity of software development and go work on my car.
Working on your car exposes you to the fruits of a bona fide engineering process: objects that are carefully designed, work reliably, and are made with serviceability in mind.
They aren't just slapped together and thrown out the door like (100-epsilon)% of software out there.
Re: Software disenchantment
#4People won't pay for efficiency. People buy solutions to their problems (features), not efficiency. If it needs to be efficient, it will be (the games example). The death of Moore's Law may rejuvenate efficient software. BTW If you use old unix tools on a phone, it's super fast (in a terminal emulator like http://termux.com ). Sadly, the idea of abstractions enabling you to think better (like Alan Kay's point of view…
> If you use old unix tools on a phone, it's super fast
Of course it is fast, software designed for a PDP-11 running on a pocket Cray.
Re: Software disenchantment
#5> Recently our industry’s lack of care for efficiency, simplicity, and excellence started really getting to me, to the point of me getting depressed by my own career and the IT in general.
Loading this website resulted in 5.3MB being downloaded over 42 requests.
Re: Software disenchantment
#6I agree with the author. Often I find it refreshing to step away from the absurdity of software development and go work on my car. Working on your car exposes you to the fruits of a bona fide engineering process: objects that are carefully designed, work reliably, and are made with serviceability in mind. They aren't just slapped together and thrown out the door like (100-epsilon)% of software out there.
I see you have an oldish car ...
Re: Software disenchantment
#7I feel the same way as the author.
I have a theory that we're not caring as much about performance and good software because we don't have to, because Moore's Law has led to machines that are fast enough to run our crappy and hastily written code with acceptable performance so the majority of users do not really care about it running more efficient.
In the past, when computing resources were constrained we had to care about performance just so we could release software that worked good enough so people actually wanted to use it.
How do we get people to care about performance and efficiency in software? I don't know.
Re: Software disenchantment
#8I feel the same way as the author. I have a theory that we're not caring as much about performance and good software because we don't have to , because Moore's Law has led to machines that are fast enough to run our crappy and hastily written code with acceptable performance so the majority of users do not really care about it running more efficient. In the past, when computing resources were constrained we had to ca…
When the cost of increasing performance enough to satisfactorily run spaghetti is greater than the cost of writing efficient code.
Re: Software disenchantment
#9It's an interesting game we are playing.
Take websites as an example. We have to build websites using CSS and HTML and JS because that is what works in browsers. But browsers have to build DOMs, layout engines and JS engines this way because that's the way we write code. It's nobody's fault. It's evolution with a bad fitness function.
We need a new start. A new paradigm.
Re: Software disenchantment
#10I feel the same way as the author. I have a theory that we're not caring as much about performance and good software because we don't have to , because Moore's Law has led to machines that are fast enough to run our crappy and hastily written code with acceptable performance so the majority of users do not really care about it running more efficient. In the past, when computing resources were constrained we had to ca…
> I have a theory that we're not caring as much about performance and good software because we don't have to, because Moore's Law has led to machines that are fast enough to run our crappy and hastily written code with acceptable performance so the majority of users do not really care about it running more efficient.
Depends what you define as "acceptable" and as "users caring". The bloat does have actual consequences, like slow websites and greatly inflated bandwidth costs (which has direct consequences for users on metered connections).
I've heard complaints from completely non-technical friends how frustrating it is to work with slow, unstable software. But of course they can't identify more detailed causes because they don't know the technical details (or are interested in them).
Likewise, they can't stop using the software because they need it to do their job. So I think there is not much else they could do to indicate they "really cared".