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"surprising depth in ... ancient code" seems extraordinarily condescending to the past, upon which computer science has evolved little.

• thehappypm 6y ago
  Perhaps what's surprising to non-programmers is that older code tends to be better/faster/more optimized than new code, which is unintuitive because new hardware is orders of magnitude better.
  • Blikkentrekker 6y ago
    “better” by definition of often applying rather absurd hacks for the sake of performance, yes, hacks that very often also compromise the output of the end result. In particular, some old video games feature the absolutely most wonderful hacks to achieve what they wanted to with the available hardware, but also often lead to engines having to make particular compromises in possibility of environment design that many players failed to notice. Many older game engines were actually incapable of stacking walkable planes on top of each other, though the levels were three dimension and one could ascend and descend, there was never any walkable surface directly under another, which was necessary for some optimizations.
  • pixl97 6y ago
    It's an inverse relationship. As the "just release a patch" method of development takes over the idea of a 'gold master' disappears. When software used to ship on floppies and no one had modems, in general software had to ship working 'well enough' because it was not easy to fix. Also older software tended to be documented better because there was no 'fire off an email' or 'ask Bob on Slack' what this code means. The barriers to quick communication where higher, hence reading the code comments would have been the path of least resistance.
    • thehappypm 6y ago
      I completely agree. I wonder if there would be a niche for high-performance languages that are maybe a little harder to write than Python but still easy, and closer to the performance of C.
• jonnypotty 6y ago
  Came here to say exactly this. There is so much arrogance in our industry, why would code from the past be worse?
  • abraae 6y ago
    Medicine is a similar field that advances enormously based on increasing knowledge hand in hand with incredible leaps in technology. Is it arrogance to say that medicine is far better than it was in the past?
    • Supermancho 6y ago
      > Is it arrogance to say that medicine is far better than it was in the past? Irrelevant. Medicine and Software Development are not correlated, just because we want them to be. That's the point. Software Development results seem to have devolved (quality metrics such as binary size for equivalent reliability, functionality, and notably time to release), despite improvements in almost every aspect of development tooling. Also interesting to note, these quality metrics follow along expected curves (accounting for development tooling) when DUPLICATING (sometimes with small improvements) working software. This tells us a great deal about what is a large problem with modern software.
      • oblio 6y ago
        > quality metrics such as binary size for equivalent reliability, functionality, and notably time to release Binary size is not a quality metric.
        • saagarjha 6y ago
          Maybe not to you…
          • oblio 6y ago
            To the vast majority of software developers and software projects out there, except for very constrained embedded environments. Server back ends don't care about it, front ends don't care about it despite the lip service paid, games sure as hell don't, etc A small minority of web devs seem to care, together with creators of already gigantic mobile apps and as I was saying, embedded devs working in very constrained environments. The market, as a whole, maybe has this as their 100th priority. Which means it's not.
• xiphias2 6y ago
  Computer science evolved a lot, we have self driving cars running on the road. Of course the computing power improved a lot, but deep learning algorithms are also improving faster than Moore's law. It's just improving classical computer science has less practical benefits than machine learning nowdays, so the focus of research changed.
• johnfn 6y ago
  Is it really? The much more likely assumption to me is that something as basic as a calculator app wouldn’t have particularly complex internals.