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Solid post, but complaining is easy. Programmers have complained about slow software, excessive complexity and abstraction for almost the whole history of compu

Solid post, but complaining is easy. Programmers have complained about slow software, excessive complexity and abstraction for almost the whole history of computing. What are some non-toy examples of people doing it right? What are concrete steps we can take to write cleaner, faster software? -- I think HN itself is a pretty inspirational example. It's one of v few sites that always loads fast, even on a bad network. It has zero ads, zero trackers, and very little fluff. So what does HN put significant effort into? Moderation, tools for moderation, algorithms to detect spam and brigading, etc. So one concrete suggestion is to focus your engineering effort and your hiring "below the waterline". The best software is often minimalist, with lots of thought and effort invested below the surface. A classic example is the original google.com: just two buttons and a text box. Much bloat comes from teams that only know how to think about the part of the software they can see.

hordeallergy 7y ago
And any issue can be fixed the HN way - write a rule forbidding discussion of the issue.
asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
Sublime Text would be IMO an example of doing it right, at least from the perspective of this author. It's quite a bit faster than other recently developed text editors, while remaining attractive and functional. However! There is one big problem with "doing it right" in the Sublime Text way. It's clear, at least to me, that VSCode is overall easier to use, because the plugin ecosystem is better (for C++). This is despite the fact that VSCode is a bit slower, being based on Electron and web technologies rather than native GUI libraries. I'm not positive why it is that the plugin ecosystem is so much better. I will say that when I once tried to write a plugin for Sublime Text 2, the API was not great, and it was difficult to build asynchronous work into the plugin. I wonder if the choice of Python as the plugin language was worse than Javascript, if only because Javascript has some well thought-out solutions to asynchronous operations.
- pseudalopex 7y ago
  Sublime Text was mostly developed by one person and costs $80.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
    That's a decent guess, but Sublime Text anecdotally seemed to be used by a ton of people, and for a while the plugin ecosystem was much more developed.
    - pseudalopex 7y ago
      Sublime Text had a 7 year head start. Some people used it but always wanted an open source equivalent. Some people switched because ST3 was in beta for 4 years.
- robenkleene 7y ago
  To be clear on why Visual Studio Code is better, there are between 20-25 people working on it at Microsoft[0]. Both Sublime Text and TextMate, the editors that were replaced before GitHub and Microsoft got in this game, were largely written and maintained by a single developer. So there's your answer about why they're better. They have a gigantic order of magnitude more resources poured into them, and they're free. Maintaining the best text editor in the world can be done on budget that's still a rounding error to a big company, and for whatever reason some of those companies are interested in owning that market now. [0]: https://blog.robenkleene.com/2019/04/25/visual-studio-code-corporate-sponsored-open-source/ https://blog.robenkleene.com/2019/04/25/visual-studio-code-c...

hordeallergy 7y ago

And any issue can be fixed the HN way - write a rule forbidding discussion of the issue.

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago

Sublime Text would be IMO an example of doing it right, at least from the perspective of this author. It's quite a bit faster than other recently developed text editors, while remaining attractive and functional. However! There is one big problem with "doing it right" in the Sublime Text way. It's clear, at least to me, that VSCode is overall easier to use, because the plugin ecosystem is better (for C++). This is despite the fact that VSCode is a bit slower, being based on Electron and web technologies rather than native GUI libraries. I'm not positive why it is that the plugin ecosystem is so much better. I will say that when I once tried to write a plugin for Sublime Text 2, the API was not great, and it was difficult to build asynchronous work into the plugin. I wonder if the choice of Python as the plugin language was worse than Javascript, if only because Javascript has some well thought-out solutions to asynchronous operations.

pseudalopex 7y ago
Sublime Text was mostly developed by one person and costs $80.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  That's a decent guess, but Sublime Text anecdotally seemed to be used by a ton of people, and for a while the plugin ecosystem was much more developed.
  - pseudalopex 7y ago
    Sublime Text had a 7 year head start. Some people used it but always wanted an open source equivalent. Some people switched because ST3 was in beta for 4 years.
robenkleene 7y ago
To be clear on why Visual Studio Code is better, there are between 20-25 people working on it at Microsoft[0]. Both Sublime Text and TextMate, the editors that were replaced before GitHub and Microsoft got in this game, were largely written and maintained by a single developer. So there's your answer about why they're better. They have a gigantic order of magnitude more resources poured into them, and they're free. Maintaining the best text editor in the world can be done on budget that's still a rounding error to a big company, and for whatever reason some of those companies are interested in owning that market now. [0]: https://blog.robenkleene.com/2019/04/25/visual-studio-code-corporate-sponsored-open-source/ https://blog.robenkleene.com/2019/04/25/visual-studio-code-c...