3 ms·

Developers have always been lazy. I think some of the best developers are the laziest developers, the ones who are motivated enough to find innovative ways to

by cout 5y ago

Developers have always been lazy. I think some of the best developers are the laziest developers, the ones who are motivated enough to find innovative ways to do less work. When I was programming for DOS, if I wanted to write to the screen in color I had a few options. I could use Borland's conio.h, I could invoke INT 21h and rely on ANSI.SYS to render my color, I could use INT 10h to write a character at a time in the color I want, or I could write directly to screen memory. Writing directly was really the only way to get the performance I needed, but it added complexity, since I needed knowledge of the hardware I was running on (not all video adapters map character cells to segment B800h). Today, for a similar "text mode" application, I can use ncurses, or I can write CSI codes directly to the terminal. I can write in C or Python or even Javascript. There are more moving parts, but it would be less work to dust off my old 386SX than it would be to get those moving parts out of the way. No matter what, I'm always going to do the minimal amount of work I need to get the desired result. If someone comes up with a way to do less work and get better performance, that's the ticket to high speed.

asdff 5y ago
Its less about minimal amount of work and more about what you can get away with. You now tolerate less performant and lazier solutions because hardware is so much faster and you can now get away with it in front of your users. For example, microsoft excel feels no faster or more special or does anything more really than the version I was using in 1995 which was served on cd rom or even floppies, compared to a couple GB over the air download for an application that today still takes time to open up on modern hardware. MS gets away with this because users expect the same features as 30 years ago and also expect excel to remain as slow as it felt 30 years ago. You could be lazy back in the day, but you still had to ensure your program was small enough to actually ship on physical media, and could actually run on this hardware thats several orders of magnitude slower than what developers expect users to be running today. So you can definitely get away with being even more lazy, less optimized, less performant, and still have a job shipping 'functional' software today, than what the constraints were decades ago.

by cout 5y ago

asdff 5y ago

Its less about minimal amount of work and more about what you can get away with. You now tolerate less performant and lazier solutions because hardware is so much faster and you can now get away with it in front of your users. For example, microsoft excel feels no faster or more special or does anything more really than the version I was using in 1995 which was served on cd rom or even floppies, compared to a couple GB over the air download for an application that today still takes time to open up on modern hardware. MS gets away with this because users expect the same features as 30 years ago and also expect excel to remain as slow as it felt 30 years ago. You could be lazy back in the day, but you still had to ensure your program was small enough to actually ship on physical media, and could actually run on this hardware thats several orders of magnitude slower than what developers expect users to be running today. So you can definitely get away with being even more lazy, less optimized, less performant, and still have a job shipping 'functional' software today, than what the constraints were decades ago.