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> Why is write once run anywhere such a bad idea? Hint: look up “lowest common denominator”. Because that’s all you’ll get, you follow that model to the concl
by bradknowles 5y ago
> Why is write once run anywhere such a bad idea?
Hint: look up “lowest common denominator”.
Because that’s all you’ll get, you follow that model to the conclusion. You won’t be able to write anything or do anything that is not supported on every single platform. You wanna use that nifty new graphics card? Too bad it’s only available on the latest platforms. You wanna use that nifty new machine learning module? Too bad that it can’t run on anything with less than 64GB of RAM and a Tensorflow Engine.
And so on.
If airplanes could only fly as fast and as high as the slowest and lowest flying airplane, then you wouldn’t get very far.
If two wheeled vehicles could only run as fast as the slowest two wheeled vehicle, you wouldn’t get anywhere at any kind of reasonable speed.
You create the worst “tragedy of the commons” when you go for that model. And you make everyone else live with your decision.
- foxes 5y agoI feel that is already the situation with software? Plenty of state of the art machine learning is hopelessly out of reach of individuals, you need racks of gpus and trivia knowledge to know how to actually train something (what random parameters after months of searching worked). Plenty of games require better hardware, and people accept this. My m1 MacBook is not going to run the latest game at 4k, 120hz.
- rejhgadellaa 5y agoIt's kind of funny because iOS is currently the “lowest common denominator” - by far - when it comes to the web. And boy does it set the bar. Safari/WebKit is hopelessly behind and suffers from bugs and quirks that makes it very hard to build a decent experience using the web. Browser choice could help raise that bar.