3 ms·

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 hardwar

• 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.