3 ms·

He is looking at the wrong metric. It's not how much disk space or ram it takes up. It's certainly not the amount of dollars/megabyte it burns. It's how much

by gHosts 8y ago

He is looking at the wrong metric. It's not how much disk space or ram it takes up. It's certainly not the amount of dollars/megabyte it burns. It's how much mind space of both the user and the developer it takes up. Alas, mindspace is the one thing utterly untouched by Moore's Law for millenia.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
... or rather, doesn't take up, resulting in software with tons of broken behaviour (including vulnerabilities) because the developers don't really understand what they are working with sufficiently.
emodendroket 8y ago
To be fair, he's countering articles that do focus on those exact things (and "Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping" suggests these attacks have a long pedigree). To take his example of Word, I don't think it really affects users negatively that there are tons of features they don't use. If all you want to do is use it like Wordpad, nothing's stopping you, and many users do just that. But if you want to start automating features with VBA, doing extremely complex mail merges, building a bibliography, or all sorts of other great features, they're there for you. And any reasonably-designed software should be designed so that you don't have to know the whole thing inside and out to work on one feature. When I think of software I use often, quite of a lot of it is very complex, fully-featured software, and I'm sure there are many features I never use (e.g., IntelliJ, Chrome, Office, JDownloader). In this respect I really don't believe in the "Unix philosophy," at least for GUI programs.
- informatimago 8y ago
  About Eight Megas And Constantly Swapping, I would note that emacs 24 (X11) is 14 MB on a 64-bit linux, 46 MB if you count the associated files (/usr/share/emacs), while the web browser that started at a few MB on NeXT, is now at 163 MB on same 64-bit linux (/usr/lib/firefox). So on one hand, a full-featured extensible program whose size barely changes over 35 years, and one the other hand, a single purpose application, somewhat extensible, whose size grows exponentially over 25 years (and it's very much NOT limited to the 163 MB on disk space, since if you want to show or run anything in a browser window, you have basically to download it from the Internet, and since the least web page is 300 KB download size...). At one point, we have to address the question of the programming language. C++ with its templates, and its baroque syntax and typing rules, multiplies the the size of the sources and the object files. Even the lighter C, when used with modern programming techniques (the older ways would lead to too many bugs and security holes), involves a lot of (by-hand!) code duplication (even with _Generic in C11). On the other hand, emacs written (mostly) in lisp uses a programming language that is basically generic. Since types are not checked at compilation-time, but at run-time, any function is essentially a generic function by default, and this leads to a lot of reusability and avoids a lot of code duplication. In addition, the use of a garbage collector (and in some cases, run-time checks for immutable data) means that you can avoid a lot of data duplication; this is not possible in C or C++, therefore you can witness a lot of data copying and duplication in those programs, to ensure manually memory and "const" safety.
  - emodendroket 8y ago
    "Eight megs" was supposed to be a hyperbolic claim about how much RAM it used, not the size of the application on disk (hence the "constantly swapping" part -- i.e., it's constantly going to your HD's swap partition because it wants to use so much RAM).
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      Given that my 386 had 2MB in 1991, 8MB were quite a lot, hence the joke.

by gHosts 8y ago

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago

... or rather, doesn't take up, resulting in software with tons of broken behaviour (including vulnerabilities) because the developers don't really understand what they are working with sufficiently.

emodendroket 8y ago

To be fair, he's countering articles that do focus on those exact things (and "Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping" suggests these attacks have a long pedigree). To take his example of Word, I don't think it really affects users negatively that there are tons of features they don't use. If all you want to do is use it like Wordpad, nothing's stopping you, and many users do just that. But if you want to start automating features with VBA, doing extremely complex mail merges, building a bibliography, or all sorts of other great features, they're there for you. And any reasonably-designed software should be designed so that you don't have to know the whole thing inside and out to work on one feature. When I think of software I use often, quite of a lot of it is very complex, fully-featured software, and I'm sure there are many features I never use (e.g., IntelliJ, Chrome, Office, JDownloader). In this respect I really don't believe in the "Unix philosophy," at least for GUI programs.

informatimago 8y ago
About Eight Megas And Constantly Swapping, I would note that emacs 24 (X11) is 14 MB on a 64-bit linux, 46 MB if you count the associated files (/usr/share/emacs), while the web browser that started at a few MB on NeXT, is now at 163 MB on same 64-bit linux (/usr/lib/firefox). So on one hand, a full-featured extensible program whose size barely changes over 35 years, and one the other hand, a single purpose application, somewhat extensible, whose size grows exponentially over 25 years (and it's very much NOT limited to the 163 MB on disk space, since if you want to show or run anything in a browser window, you have basically to download it from the Internet, and since the least web page is 300 KB download size...). At one point, we have to address the question of the programming language. C++ with its templates, and its baroque syntax and typing rules, multiplies the the size of the sources and the object files. Even the lighter C, when used with modern programming techniques (the older ways would lead to too many bugs and security holes), involves a lot of (by-hand!) code duplication (even with _Generic in C11). On the other hand, emacs written (mostly) in lisp uses a programming language that is basically generic. Since types are not checked at compilation-time, but at run-time, any function is essentially a generic function by default, and this leads to a lot of reusability and avoids a lot of code duplication. In addition, the use of a garbage collector (and in some cases, run-time checks for immutable data) means that you can avoid a lot of data duplication; this is not possible in C or C++, therefore you can witness a lot of data copying and duplication in those programs, to ensure manually memory and "const" safety.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  "Eight megs" was supposed to be a hyperbolic claim about how much RAM it used, not the size of the application on disk (hence the "constantly swapping" part -- i.e., it's constantly going to your HD's swap partition because it wants to use so much RAM).
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Given that my 386 had 2MB in 1991, 8MB were quite a lot, hence the joke.