3 ms·

I'm so weary of this moral panic we've been having. There are so many other factors to be weighed against efficiency when it comes to making software. There are

by _bxg1 7y ago

I'm so weary of this moral panic we've been having. There are so many other factors to be weighed against efficiency when it comes to making software. There are completely legitimate tradeoffs to be made that sacrifice performance. There are also programmers who write bad code on all dimensions - performance included - out of sheer laziness. But those aren't the primary cause of this hardware "waste". Demanding efficiency for efficiency's sake, ignoring all other constraints, is shortsighted and narrow-minded.

opportune 7y ago
Yeah, I really dislike the black and white thinking. The python script example the author gives is a perfect example of what doesn’t need to be made any faster. If you are interested only in execution time, you might as well never write anything in native python. But on the other hand, a lot of web content does need to be faster. Gmail has somehow gotten so much slower to load over time. And every time I visit a newspaper/magazine website I am aghast at how bloated they are. Does that mean nodejs is inherently bad, no, but it does mean people should try to optimize noticeably terrible performance that actually degrades UX.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  Sure. But even that probably has more to do with businesses prioritizing features over quality, not programmers lacking character. Much of it on the web also has to do with how much browsers can do. The number of CSS properties that can be applied, the ways different elements' sizes can automatically influence the layout of other elements, etc. These traits are what make the web such a powerful and attractive platform for user interfaces, but the complexity of the platform is definitely becoming a real issue that deserves attention. A couple of points: - NodeJS is server-only and usually has nothing to do with perceived performance of web apps - The biggest offender of web performance is ads. They dump piles and piles of crappy JavaScript from dozens of different sources that all include their own copies of common libraries and have no incentive not to slow down the page. - Beyond ads, the bottleneck is usually not even JavaScript, but layout (as in the paragraph above). Web layout is incredibly flexible and incredibly complex. Computing and rendering it all is slow, but it does serve a purpose. Not that it couldn't be improved. Bad ads are a tragedy of the commons and I don't know what can be done about them unless Google or Facebook decided to throw their weight around to force them to be better. I do wonder if a new web standard could be developed for using some constrained subset of the layout vocabulary, that would be cheaper and more straightforward to compute. The current version has to remain for backwards compatibility reasons, but it's trying to serve a bunch of different types of cases at once, and therefore doesn't do a great job at any one of them.
modo_mario 7y ago
The thing is people are not looking at the less visible stuff hidden in scope. A mere fraction of a second increase in the time you don't have to wait after klicking something? Barely noticeable. Perfectly usable. Hardly worth the time investment to improve... after all that dev's expensive and then that button or whatever gets used by countless people. That fraction of a second ends up actually being numerous lifetimes. And as it's surrounded by numerous such "slightly inefficient but efficient from some other perspective" interactions overall efficiency dies a death of a thousand cuts. When you actively start paying attention to it and comparing it to little examples of what could be you start noticing how utterly garbage everything is. Even at the base level in things that have a massive userbase and that are used not just once in a while but constantly it's disgusting trash. I look around at the company i work at. They're all using it and probably not noticing at all but the fucking file explorer in Windows is slow as fuck as is countless other elements and interactions of it. The companies website so simple in it's content and functionality and is made by a webdev agency but is a bloated mess that takes a while to get to....a logo that shows whilst it continues to load. The software my coworker wrote is small scale and he said i was wasting a lot of my time making some small action faster not recognising that it's been used many thousand times a day every day for more than 10 years now. There's way too little moral panic

by _bxg1 7y ago

opportune 7y ago

Yeah, I really dislike the black and white thinking. The python script example the author gives is a perfect example of what doesn’t need to be made any faster. If you are interested only in execution time, you might as well never write anything in native python. But on the other hand, a lot of web content does need to be faster. Gmail has somehow gotten so much slower to load over time. And every time I visit a newspaper/magazine website I am aghast at how bloated they are. Does that mean nodejs is inherently bad, no, but it does mean people should try to optimize noticeably terrible performance that actually degrades UX.

_bxg1 7y ago
Sure. But even that probably has more to do with businesses prioritizing features over quality, not programmers lacking character. Much of it on the web also has to do with how much browsers can do. The number of CSS properties that can be applied, the ways different elements' sizes can automatically influence the layout of other elements, etc. These traits are what make the web such a powerful and attractive platform for user interfaces, but the complexity of the platform is definitely becoming a real issue that deserves attention. A couple of points: - NodeJS is server-only and usually has nothing to do with perceived performance of web apps - The biggest offender of web performance is ads. They dump piles and piles of crappy JavaScript from dozens of different sources that all include their own copies of common libraries and have no incentive not to slow down the page. - Beyond ads, the bottleneck is usually not even JavaScript, but layout (as in the paragraph above). Web layout is incredibly flexible and incredibly complex. Computing and rendering it all is slow, but it does serve a purpose. Not that it couldn't be improved. Bad ads are a tragedy of the commons and I don't know what can be done about them unless Google or Facebook decided to throw their weight around to force them to be better. I do wonder if a new web standard could be developed for using some constrained subset of the layout vocabulary, that would be cheaper and more straightforward to compute. The current version has to remain for backwards compatibility reasons, but it's trying to serve a bunch of different types of cases at once, and therefore doesn't do a great job at any one of them.

modo_mario 7y ago

The thing is people are not looking at the less visible stuff hidden in scope. A mere fraction of a second increase in the time you don't have to wait after klicking something? Barely noticeable. Perfectly usable. Hardly worth the time investment to improve... after all that dev's expensive and then that button or whatever gets used by countless people. That fraction of a second ends up actually being numerous lifetimes. And as it's surrounded by numerous such "slightly inefficient but efficient from some other perspective" interactions overall efficiency dies a death of a thousand cuts. When you actively start paying attention to it and comparing it to little examples of what could be you start noticing how utterly garbage everything is. Even at the base level in things that have a massive userbase and that are used not just once in a while but constantly it's disgusting trash. I look around at the company i work at. They're all using it and probably not noticing at all but the fucking file explorer in Windows is slow as fuck as is countless other elements and interactions of it. The companies website so simple in it's content and functionality and is made by a webdev agency but is a bloated mess that takes a while to get to....a logo that shows whilst it continues to load. The software my coworker wrote is small scale and he said i was wasting a lot of my time making some small action faster not recognising that it's been used many thousand times a day every day for more than 10 years now. There's way too little moral panic