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Here's why I'm slightly annoyed by articles like this one. Oftentimes the "Software is slow" mantra rings true, but here's the thing: everyone repeating it clai

Here's why I'm slightly annoyed by articles like this one. Oftentimes the "Software is slow" mantra rings true, but here's the thing: everyone repeating it claims it's the shit further down the stack that's the cause of the slowness, this is often untrue. V8 is fast; it's your shit JS code that is slow. PostgreSQL is fast; your shit queries are slow. We live in the age of the Stack Overflow programmer. Think about it for just a second, what requires the most competency? Writing V8 or PostgreSQL, or churning out some JS for a web app or Electron? It's not the programmers working on the former that is not concerned about performance. They spend considerable effort on it. The least competent programmers are the once writing slow code. The least competent programmers are the ones working at the top of the stack.

lerpapoo 7y ago
yea, I don't like articles like this for the same reason. nobody has the brain power (yet) to rewrite the entire stack in a gpu shader and add in complex logic and a dynamic interface. it's an optimization vs delivery tradeoff. If someone is getting payed to build a product, they must deliver it with the tools at hand, you can invest time to optimize it but it will come at a cost of less features. This also depends on the industry, if you are building lower stack drivers that others will depend on, you care about performance more. Higher level applications are more user oriented and care more about ui and features. organically, people tend to spend their time and braincells in the most valuable way they can. a lot of products, especially in the web world, features hold more value than performance. Once we get the agi thing going, we can just task it to strip and redesign the entire OS down to the kernel and tailored for every user, strip everything down to only the buttons that the user clicks. some granny only knows how to open up google and read her newspaper website, all that other code can be removed lol.

lerpapoo 7y ago

yea, I don't like articles like this for the same reason. nobody has the brain power (yet) to rewrite the entire stack in a gpu shader and add in complex logic and a dynamic interface. it's an optimization vs delivery tradeoff. If someone is getting payed to build a product, they must deliver it with the tools at hand, you can invest time to optimize it but it will come at a cost of less features. This also depends on the industry, if you are building lower stack drivers that others will depend on, you care about performance more. Higher level applications are more user oriented and care more about ui and features. organically, people tend to spend their time and braincells in the most valuable way they can. a lot of products, especially in the web world, features hold more value than performance. Once we get the agi thing going, we can just task it to strip and redesign the entire OS down to the kernel and tailored for every user, strip everything down to only the buttons that the user clicks. some granny only knows how to open up google and read her newspaper website, all that other code can be removed lol.