9 ms·

I just don't buy this. I cut my teeth as a HPC programmer working with C and writing no-lock algorithms. There will always be a need for that, but realistically

I just don't buy this. I cut my teeth as a HPC programmer working with C and writing no-lock algorithms. There will always be a need for that, but realistically the vast majority of software being developed is simply not performance-critical. It's designed to work at human speed. Advances in language, compiler, and runtime implementations will continue to keep up with any growth in the need for performant applications for the foreseeable future, despite the looming collapse of Moore's Law.

falcolas 7y ago
Even if the software only needs to respond at a certain speed, scale will quickly make you either pay through the nose for better hardware or optimize the software so that it can respond in a small fraction of the original speed. The trick, as always, is finding balance between paying for hardware and paying developers.
- tluyben2 7y ago
  But that is the case now too and in my experience it swung to paying through the nose for hardware in general; as more or less a sidetrack I take on projects where I optimise (mostly online) systems. Example; a few weeks ago a startup asked me to check out their setup as they were spending almost 30k$/mo on AWS. I spent a few days optimising and now they are down to less than 10k$. With some more work it will be a few 1000$; there is still so much wrong. But that is less low hanging fruit so it will be a lot more expensive. Still well worth it imho. People really bought into the ‘people are more expensive than hardware’ as an excuse to get screwed like this. For $5k in human cost, these guys (and their investors) now save 200k/year in hosting. And this is not an isolated story; I am working on another one at this very moment. Programmers have become so incredibly sloppy with the ‘autoscaling’ and ‘serverless’ cloud ‘revolution’.
  - ledauphin 7y ago
    You're quite right that there's plenty to optimize. It's not that there isn't money in optimizing. It's that there's often not _enough_ money in optimizing to rise to the level of the top N priorities for a business.
    - tluyben2 7y ago
      Agreed, until you raise it at the right level at the right time. People do not find me for nothing... Usually after the initial launch euphoria dies down and someone looks at the books and asks why such a large % of the expenditure goes there. People start looking around online and see things like ‘our application serves 200k requests/day with one 50$/mo server’ and compare that with their 30k/mo setup barely serving 50k/day and start poking around. It is usually apples and pears, but more often than not there are massive issues. Most of them I would consider beginner issues but they are not made by beginners; many senior programmers I meet simply do not know about normal forms, proper types (all are stringy), proper indexes, O(n^2) etc; they trust cloud scaling to solve it all. And it does! But it costs...
    - tluyben2 7y ago
      And ofcourse, there is a limit to what you want to spend even if it might make some profit long term. You need to be able to find programmers to maintain things etc as well. If I needed something handling massive traffic while handling real business logic but not allowed to cost more than a few bucks in hosting, I would use something like [0]. But that would be silly for maintenance reasons alone. Does anyone know a modern (well maintained I mean really) equivalent though? I played around with this a long time ago and it is incredibly efficient. [0] http://datadraw.sourceforge.net/ http://datadraw.sourceforge.net/ (github; https://github.com/waywardgeek/datadraw https://github.com/waywardgeek/datadraw as sourceforge seems down) Edit; maybe I answered that last question by finding a github version: seems waywardgeek does maintain at least to keep it running.
      - zozbot234 7y ago
        > Does anyone know a modern (well maintained I mean really) equivalent though? I played around with this a long time ago and it is incredibly efficient. https://diesel.rs https://diesel.rs ? Maybe https://tql.antoyo.xyz/ https://tql.antoyo.xyz/ if you care more about ease of use.
        tluyben2 7y ago
        Datadraw is not an ORM; it is more comparable to a statically compiled Redis. So it is far less flexible, but it is very efficient/fast. One of the purposes of Datadraw is for instance to build SQL databases on top of.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    > almost 30k$/mo That's like, a couple full-time developers, AIUI? Maybe even less than that. Perhaps the people who say "people are more expensive than hardware" have a point - at least in the Bay Area. Or you can move to the Rust Belt if you'd like a change.
    - tluyben2 7y ago
      Sure, but my point was that they cut that bill with 20k PER month by giving me 5k one off... They gave me 10k runway to poke around but 5k was enough to fix it; it was simply that bad to start with. The low hanging fruit in most systems I see is really trivial to fix; they just have no one to do it... I bet other people here have seen that before when thrown into an existing project (and I read Spolsky at an impressionable point in my career so I am usually the one against rewriting the whole thing outright).
      - johnny22 7y ago
        seems like you deserve more of a cut than that.
        tluyben2 7y ago
        Well, the premise going in after a quick (very quick) review of the system was: 'I will check what I can do in 5 days at $10k; I believe I can help, but if I cannot, you lose $10k. If I can help you in less time, you only pay that time.'. I do not think I can move that to some other deal with that premise. Maybe if I say; 'I will do this for 50% of the money you save in 12 months after I am done' that would work, but this is is a side thing which I do because I like optimizing things; if I sell it in another way, it's not bound to time which will make it a timesink and risk. It is a choice.
        pdimitar 7y ago
        I am curious how do you even find a side job like that. I am definitely a spiritual brother with you because I love optimising things. But I am very unsure how do I even start a side career with that premise. Any advice?
  - herval 7y ago
    What sort of waste you tend to see more, if you do this regularly? Is it the case that people are aware of the cost and “don’t care”, or is it surprising/hidden cost?
    - tluyben2 7y ago
      There are 2 types: 1) they know the costs and thought it would scale infinitely with money but it doesn't (crashes, hangs, etc) 2) they knew it would cost more to scale but they did not expect it going up quite that fast as it does with more traffic (not linear).
  - falcolas 7y ago
    > paying through the nose for hardware in general You also have to consider that there are limits to how parallel an application can be - Amdahl's Law - at some point even throwing hardware at a scaling issues has its limits. Of course, there's also a truism that the team who implemented the first pass won't have to support (financially or as a developer) the software when it no longer scales.
    - dnautics 7y ago
      No, amdahl's law is (roughly speaking) a limit to how parallel an algorithm can be. Applications (in the sense of web apps) generally have the potential to scale via Gustafson's law, but we are (IMO) largely held back by framework and old ways of programming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson's_law
      - falcolas 7y ago
        So long as an application needs to share state between worker processes, (database, redis cluster, etc) then Amdahl’s law still applies. There’s very few modern applications that can truly scale linearly.
        dnautics 7y ago
        Share consistent state. Eventually consistent models (most web apps) are often generally okay.
        imtringued 7y ago
        You're confusing something. Fully consistent databases are primarily limited by the speed of communication because they need to replicate writes and queries to all nodes and wait for a response even if a node is on the other side of the planet. Unless your CPU is extremely slow (clock frequencies of a few kilo Herz) the speed of light is a significantly more important limit. This is actually a usecase where modern CPUs are more than fast enough and we don't need a significant improvement in processing speed. Faster storage and networks are welcome though.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - pchiusano 7y ago
    I don’t know if you feel this way, but my complaint about the more hyped cloud services is that not only can they be expensive (fine) but the promised time-savings and simplicity of operating the system often doesn’t really materialize either, except in restricted circumstances that you don’t appreciate in advance and only find out later after you’ve already committed. If it really did save time and were simpler, some companies would (quite reasonably) be willing to pay a premium for that - time is money and all that. In reality it seems like people often end up with the worst of both worlds - it’s expensive, complicated, still needs a huge staff to maintain, and doesn’t even work that well.
    - tluyben2 7y ago
      Well it is better than making even trivial architectures with actual hardware (I have some pictures of me hauling servers over xmas a long time ago; that was cheap (in monthlies and hardware, not in hours!) but I would and do pay a premium for that). Otherwise I do agree somewhat; most overbearing systems can be done much simpler but we are all preparing (and thus paying) for eventualities that most likely will never occur or will not influence the bottom line. Tech like AWS Lambda (of which I like the theoretical idea) are meant to remedy the issues with complexity for a premium. But that premium makes, personally, my eyes water. I cannot see any high volume operation justifying going live with it. Are there big examples of those? And how is it justified vs the alternatives (which are, besides some programmer+admin time and scalability) far more efficient?
      - garethmcc 7y ago
        There are some significant high volume cases. We work with companies doing billions of Lambda invocations per month and realising large cost saving benefits. Lambda itself is usually the smallest part of the bill as one of the advantages of building serverless applications is you shift the responsibility of certain execution to specially designed managed services as opposed to code consuming CPU cycles; for example API Gateway takes over routing, S3 takes over file system calls, etc. A large portion of savings organisations see though is in time to production, as well as the overhead of managing servers and container clusters which is a lot more costly than you might think. Especially in the environment we are in now where qualified Dev Ops talent is hard to come by and at a premium. Sure, a developer can take some time to try and learn how to put together some infrastructure, but that's time taken away from adding direct value to business needs and not to mention the fall out when things go pear shaped later because it turns out a few hours Googling doesn't turn someone into a DevOps expert.
- 6510 7y ago
  That is how people reason about it but we could argue it is the balance between who pays for the hardware and who pays for the software. I.O.W., If you have a program with millions of users you make something that performs well enough for people to pay for it. While each cpu cycle wasted then becomes millions of cycles, you never get billed for those it doesn't matter to you. I wonder if an eco system is possible where software providers have to pay for ALL resources consumed. It sounds ridiculous but having any transaction going on would make monetizing software a lot easier. It would for the most part boil down to billing the end user for the data stored, the cpu cycles and the bandwidth consumed. A perfectly competitive vehicle. Want to invest in growing your user base? Pay part of their fees and undercut the competition. It would make it more logical if they didn't own the device. The hardware can scale with usage. You just replace the desktop, console or phone with one better fit for their consumption.
majewsky 7y ago
> It's designed to work at human speed. It would be great if most applications worked at human speed. Instead we have web applications taking 5 seconds to load what is basically 3 records from a small database.
- ac29 7y ago
  That is human speed though (better than human speed, even). For most human tasks that need to be done, 5ms versus 5s doesn't really matter. Consider also that spending an hour at the DMV for them to update a database entry or two is also human speed.
  - userbinator 7y ago
    No, it really really matters. Small things add up, when you're forced to do them multiple times every day.
  - wongarsu 7y ago
    What? 100ms is "human speed". When doing anything interactive the difference between 25ms and 5s is monumental. Even just for pressing confirmation buttons 5s is slow enough that you need some substantially faster reacting visual confirmation (loading animation or whatever) to satisfy humans.
  - austhrow743 7y ago
    5ms versus 5s is the difference between being tempted to check or think about something else or not. Multiply that option over and over with a repetitive task and anyone but your most disciplined monk is going to find themselves getting side tracked regularly.
- userbinator 7y ago
  ...or "instant"(!) messaging applications taking gigabytes of memory and a full CPU core, and yet still can barely keep up with how fast a human can type. I've often complained out loud with coworkers, while waiting for some horrible webapp to do its thing: "This computer can execute over a billion instructions every second. How many instructions does it take to render some formatted text!?!?" Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16001407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16001407
dehrmann 7y ago
I have a few PCs running Windows 10 that are older than 5 years. As long as they have SSDs and you're not gaming, they're still plenty fast, even for modern websites.
- asdff 7y ago
  I have a macbook that's 8 years old with an ssd and 16gb of RAM. Only struggles with gaming on the integrated graphics, and the battery life has always been abysmal with the thirsty 35w i5 cpu.
commandlinefan 7y ago
> the vast majority of software being developed is simply not performance-critical Programmers keep saying this, and users keep complaining about slow software.
burfog 7y ago
What about battery life? If you prefer, call it carbon footprint. Python has a huge carbon footprint. We should get rid of slow languages for environmental reasons.
- yyhhsj0521 7y ago
  But then we'd have to pour in more manpower, which involves more commute, more upkeeping (AC, lunch), etc.
  - agumonkey 7y ago
    remote
  - atq2119 7y ago
    So... are you saying people are going to have more kids because we stop using Python? For equal numbers of humans, all those energy/environmental costs you mention are going to be there regardless of which programming language is used...
    - yyhhsj0521 7y ago
      This has to happen if we use a lot of manpower inefficient tools, and still want to keep our current pace of R&D.
  - yxhuvud 7y ago
    Only if you are convinced there is a fundamental need for more manpower for code written in faster languages. For me personally, Crystal was the language that convinced me that great dev UX and productivity is possible in compiled languages. As far as I'm concerned, it even beats Ruby in both. YMMV.
  - asdff 7y ago
    Or just stop using python going forward
  - pdimitar 7y ago
Clubber 7y ago
>but realistically the vast majority of software being developed is simply not performance-critical. It's designed to work at human speed. I learned this by greatly improving a scheduling system algorithm that could schedule 10-12 related (to each other) medical procedures while accounting for 47 dynamic rules (existing appointments, outage blocks, usage blocks, zero patient waiting, procedure split times, etc) to sub second, improving the current algorithm's 13 seconds. You know what? It didn't matter. That was our speed test scenario (most realistically complex one a customer had). The customer was fine with 13 seconds because it was so much faster than doing it by hand and these customers were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for the licenses. Because of this, the improved algorithm was never implemented. It was a neat algorithm though. Absolute maximum performance has its place, it's just not every place.
goatinaboat 7y ago
the vast majority of software being developed is simply not performance-critical. It's designed to work at human speed But what does that even mean? A 3Ghz quad-core can do 12 billion things per second yet I still regularly experience lags keeping up with typing or mouse movements, scrolling webpages, redrawing windows... the actual interactive experience has gotten much worse since the 90s.

falcolas 7y ago

Even if the software only needs to respond at a certain speed, scale will quickly make you either pay through the nose for better hardware or optimize the software so that it can respond in a small fraction of the original speed. The trick, as always, is finding balance between paying for hardware and paying developers.

tluyben2 7y ago
But that is the case now too and in my experience it swung to paying through the nose for hardware in general; as more or less a sidetrack I take on projects where I optimise (mostly online) systems. Example; a few weeks ago a startup asked me to check out their setup as they were spending almost 30k$/mo on AWS. I spent a few days optimising and now they are down to less than 10k$. With some more work it will be a few 1000$; there is still so much wrong. But that is less low hanging fruit so it will be a lot more expensive. Still well worth it imho. People really bought into the ‘people are more expensive than hardware’ as an excuse to get screwed like this. For $5k in human cost, these guys (and their investors) now save 200k/year in hosting. And this is not an isolated story; I am working on another one at this very moment. Programmers have become so incredibly sloppy with the ‘autoscaling’ and ‘serverless’ cloud ‘revolution’.
- ledauphin 7y ago
  You're quite right that there's plenty to optimize. It's not that there isn't money in optimizing. It's that there's often not _enough_ money in optimizing to rise to the level of the top N priorities for a business.
  - tluyben2 7y ago
    Agreed, until you raise it at the right level at the right time. People do not find me for nothing... Usually after the initial launch euphoria dies down and someone looks at the books and asks why such a large % of the expenditure goes there. People start looking around online and see things like ‘our application serves 200k requests/day with one 50$/mo server’ and compare that with their 30k/mo setup barely serving 50k/day and start poking around. It is usually apples and pears, but more often than not there are massive issues. Most of them I would consider beginner issues but they are not made by beginners; many senior programmers I meet simply do not know about normal forms, proper types (all are stringy), proper indexes, O(n^2) etc; they trust cloud scaling to solve it all. And it does! But it costs...
  - tluyben2 7y ago
    And ofcourse, there is a limit to what you want to spend even if it might make some profit long term. You need to be able to find programmers to maintain things etc as well. If I needed something handling massive traffic while handling real business logic but not allowed to cost more than a few bucks in hosting, I would use something like [0]. But that would be silly for maintenance reasons alone. Does anyone know a modern (well maintained I mean really) equivalent though? I played around with this a long time ago and it is incredibly efficient. [0] http://datadraw.sourceforge.net/ http://datadraw.sourceforge.net/ (github; https://github.com/waywardgeek/datadraw https://github.com/waywardgeek/datadraw as sourceforge seems down) Edit; maybe I answered that last question by finding a github version: seems waywardgeek does maintain at least to keep it running.
    - zozbot234 7y ago
      > Does anyone know a modern (well maintained I mean really) equivalent though? I played around with this a long time ago and it is incredibly efficient. https://diesel.rs https://diesel.rs ? Maybe https://tql.antoyo.xyz/ https://tql.antoyo.xyz/ if you care more about ease of use.
      - tluyben2 7y ago
        Datadraw is not an ORM; it is more comparable to a statically compiled Redis. So it is far less flexible, but it is very efficient/fast. One of the purposes of Datadraw is for instance to build SQL databases on top of.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > almost 30k$/mo That's like, a couple full-time developers, AIUI? Maybe even less than that. Perhaps the people who say "people are more expensive than hardware" have a point - at least in the Bay Area. Or you can move to the Rust Belt if you'd like a change.
  - tluyben2 7y ago
    Sure, but my point was that they cut that bill with 20k PER month by giving me 5k one off... They gave me 10k runway to poke around but 5k was enough to fix it; it was simply that bad to start with. The low hanging fruit in most systems I see is really trivial to fix; they just have no one to do it... I bet other people here have seen that before when thrown into an existing project (and I read Spolsky at an impressionable point in my career so I am usually the one against rewriting the whole thing outright).
    - johnny22 7y ago
      seems like you deserve more of a cut than that.
      - tluyben2 7y ago
        Well, the premise going in after a quick (very quick) review of the system was: 'I will check what I can do in 5 days at $10k; I believe I can help, but if I cannot, you lose $10k. If I can help you in less time, you only pay that time.'. I do not think I can move that to some other deal with that premise. Maybe if I say; 'I will do this for 50% of the money you save in 12 months after I am done' that would work, but this is is a side thing which I do because I like optimizing things; if I sell it in another way, it's not bound to time which will make it a timesink and risk. It is a choice.
        pdimitar 7y ago
        I am curious how do you even find a side job like that. I am definitely a spiritual brother with you because I love optimising things. But I am very unsure how do I even start a side career with that premise. Any advice?
- herval 7y ago
  What sort of waste you tend to see more, if you do this regularly? Is it the case that people are aware of the cost and “don’t care”, or is it surprising/hidden cost?
  - tluyben2 7y ago
    There are 2 types: 1) they know the costs and thought it would scale infinitely with money but it doesn't (crashes, hangs, etc) 2) they knew it would cost more to scale but they did not expect it going up quite that fast as it does with more traffic (not linear).
- falcolas 7y ago
  > paying through the nose for hardware in general You also have to consider that there are limits to how parallel an application can be - Amdahl's Law - at some point even throwing hardware at a scaling issues has its limits. Of course, there's also a truism that the team who implemented the first pass won't have to support (financially or as a developer) the software when it no longer scales.
  - dnautics 7y ago
    No, amdahl's law is (roughly speaking) a limit to how parallel an algorithm can be. Applications (in the sense of web apps) generally have the potential to scale via Gustafson's law, but we are (IMO) largely held back by framework and old ways of programming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson's_law
    - falcolas 7y ago
      So long as an application needs to share state between worker processes, (database, redis cluster, etc) then Amdahl’s law still applies. There’s very few modern applications that can truly scale linearly.
      - dnautics 7y ago
        Share consistent state. Eventually consistent models (most web apps) are often generally okay.
      - imtringued 7y ago
        You're confusing something. Fully consistent databases are primarily limited by the speed of communication because they need to replicate writes and queries to all nodes and wait for a response even if a node is on the other side of the planet. Unless your CPU is extremely slow (clock frequencies of a few kilo Herz) the speed of light is a significantly more important limit. This is actually a usecase where modern CPUs are more than fast enough and we don't need a significant improvement in processing speed. Faster storage and networks are welcome though.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- pchiusano 7y ago
  I don’t know if you feel this way, but my complaint about the more hyped cloud services is that not only can they be expensive (fine) but the promised time-savings and simplicity of operating the system often doesn’t really materialize either, except in restricted circumstances that you don’t appreciate in advance and only find out later after you’ve already committed. If it really did save time and were simpler, some companies would (quite reasonably) be willing to pay a premium for that - time is money and all that. In reality it seems like people often end up with the worst of both worlds - it’s expensive, complicated, still needs a huge staff to maintain, and doesn’t even work that well.
  - tluyben2 7y ago
    Well it is better than making even trivial architectures with actual hardware (I have some pictures of me hauling servers over xmas a long time ago; that was cheap (in monthlies and hardware, not in hours!) but I would and do pay a premium for that). Otherwise I do agree somewhat; most overbearing systems can be done much simpler but we are all preparing (and thus paying) for eventualities that most likely will never occur or will not influence the bottom line. Tech like AWS Lambda (of which I like the theoretical idea) are meant to remedy the issues with complexity for a premium. But that premium makes, personally, my eyes water. I cannot see any high volume operation justifying going live with it. Are there big examples of those? And how is it justified vs the alternatives (which are, besides some programmer+admin time and scalability) far more efficient?
    - garethmcc 7y ago
      There are some significant high volume cases. We work with companies doing billions of Lambda invocations per month and realising large cost saving benefits. Lambda itself is usually the smallest part of the bill as one of the advantages of building serverless applications is you shift the responsibility of certain execution to specially designed managed services as opposed to code consuming CPU cycles; for example API Gateway takes over routing, S3 takes over file system calls, etc. A large portion of savings organisations see though is in time to production, as well as the overhead of managing servers and container clusters which is a lot more costly than you might think. Especially in the environment we are in now where qualified Dev Ops talent is hard to come by and at a premium. Sure, a developer can take some time to try and learn how to put together some infrastructure, but that's time taken away from adding direct value to business needs and not to mention the fall out when things go pear shaped later because it turns out a few hours Googling doesn't turn someone into a DevOps expert.
6510 7y ago
That is how people reason about it but we could argue it is the balance between who pays for the hardware and who pays for the software. I.O.W., If you have a program with millions of users you make something that performs well enough for people to pay for it. While each cpu cycle wasted then becomes millions of cycles, you never get billed for those it doesn't matter to you. I wonder if an eco system is possible where software providers have to pay for ALL resources consumed. It sounds ridiculous but having any transaction going on would make monetizing software a lot easier. It would for the most part boil down to billing the end user for the data stored, the cpu cycles and the bandwidth consumed. A perfectly competitive vehicle. Want to invest in growing your user base? Pay part of their fees and undercut the competition. It would make it more logical if they didn't own the device. The hardware can scale with usage. You just replace the desktop, console or phone with one better fit for their consumption.

majewsky 7y ago

> It's designed to work at human speed. It would be great if most applications worked at human speed. Instead we have web applications taking 5 seconds to load what is basically 3 records from a small database.

ac29 7y ago
That is human speed though (better than human speed, even). For most human tasks that need to be done, 5ms versus 5s doesn't really matter. Consider also that spending an hour at the DMV for them to update a database entry or two is also human speed.
- userbinator 7y ago
  No, it really really matters. Small things add up, when you're forced to do them multiple times every day.
- wongarsu 7y ago
  What? 100ms is "human speed". When doing anything interactive the difference between 25ms and 5s is monumental. Even just for pressing confirmation buttons 5s is slow enough that you need some substantially faster reacting visual confirmation (loading animation or whatever) to satisfy humans.
- austhrow743 7y ago
  5ms versus 5s is the difference between being tempted to check or think about something else or not. Multiply that option over and over with a repetitive task and anyone but your most disciplined monk is going to find themselves getting side tracked regularly.
userbinator 7y ago
...or "instant"(!) messaging applications taking gigabytes of memory and a full CPU core, and yet still can barely keep up with how fast a human can type. I've often complained out loud with coworkers, while waiting for some horrible webapp to do its thing: "This computer can execute over a billion instructions every second. How many instructions does it take to render some formatted text!?!?" Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16001407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16001407

dehrmann 7y ago

I have a few PCs running Windows 10 that are older than 5 years. As long as they have SSDs and you're not gaming, they're still plenty fast, even for modern websites.

asdff 7y ago
I have a macbook that's 8 years old with an ssd and 16gb of RAM. Only struggles with gaming on the integrated graphics, and the battery life has always been abysmal with the thirsty 35w i5 cpu.

commandlinefan 7y ago

> the vast majority of software being developed is simply not performance-critical Programmers keep saying this, and users keep complaining about slow software.

burfog 7y ago

What about battery life? If you prefer, call it carbon footprint. Python has a huge carbon footprint. We should get rid of slow languages for environmental reasons.

yyhhsj0521 7y ago
But then we'd have to pour in more manpower, which involves more commute, more upkeeping (AC, lunch), etc.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  remote
- atq2119 7y ago
  So... are you saying people are going to have more kids because we stop using Python? For equal numbers of humans, all those energy/environmental costs you mention are going to be there regardless of which programming language is used...
  - yyhhsj0521 7y ago
    This has to happen if we use a lot of manpower inefficient tools, and still want to keep our current pace of R&D.
- yxhuvud 7y ago
  Only if you are convinced there is a fundamental need for more manpower for code written in faster languages. For me personally, Crystal was the language that convinced me that great dev UX and productivity is possible in compiled languages. As far as I'm concerned, it even beats Ruby in both. YMMV.
- asdff 7y ago
  Or just stop using python going forward
- pdimitar 7y ago

Clubber 7y ago

>but realistically the vast majority of software being developed is simply not performance-critical. It's designed to work at human speed. I learned this by greatly improving a scheduling system algorithm that could schedule 10-12 related (to each other) medical procedures while accounting for 47 dynamic rules (existing appointments, outage blocks, usage blocks, zero patient waiting, procedure split times, etc) to sub second, improving the current algorithm's 13 seconds. You know what? It didn't matter. That was our speed test scenario (most realistically complex one a customer had). The customer was fine with 13 seconds because it was so much faster than doing it by hand and these customers were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for the licenses. Because of this, the improved algorithm was never implemented. It was a neat algorithm though. Absolute maximum performance has its place, it's just not every place.

goatinaboat 7y ago

the vast majority of software being developed is simply not performance-critical. It's designed to work at human speed But what does that even mean? A 3Ghz quad-core can do 12 billion things per second yet I still regularly experience lags keeping up with typing or mouse movements, scrolling webpages, redrawing windows... the actual interactive experience has gotten much worse since the 90s.