7 ms·

Fully agree with the premise. Most youngish users have never even experienced true performance. Our software stacks are shit and rotten to the core, it's an emb

Fully agree with the premise. Most youngish users have never even experienced true performance. Our software stacks are shit and rotten to the core, it's an embarrassment. We'll have the smartest people in the world enabling chip design approaching the atomic level, and then there's us software "engineers" pissing it away with an inefficiency factor of 10 million %. We are very, very bad at what we do, yet somehow get richly rewarded for it. We've even invented a new performance problem: intermittent performance. Performance isn't just poor, it's also extremely variable due to distributed computing, lamba, whichever. So users can't even learn the performance pattern. Where chip designers move heaven and earth the move compute and data as closely together as is physically possible, leave it to us geniuses to tear them apart as far as we can. Also, leave it to us to completely ignore parallel computing so that your 16 cores are doing fuck all. You may now comment on why our practices are fully justified.

Xeoncross 3y ago
People give push back when I tell them they should drop PHP for Go or Python for Rust. It doesn't matter that it would be better for everyone and the planet. It's a prisoners dilemma. I only get rewarded and promoted for shipping stuff and meeting deadlines even if the products are slow. Thank God for open source. Programmers produce amazing libraries, frameworks, languages and systems when business demands and salary is out of the picture.
- jeremyjh 3y ago
  Meanwhile some people have been using C# and Java for decades which perform better than Go on many benchmarks and their software is still slow as shit.
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    Java and C# tend to be used for big, hairy, old projects. Thats far less common with Go.
  - BigJ1211 3y ago
    I was a little skeptical of this claim, so I looked it up. C# winning happens in a handful of cases, but it's extremely rare. Go practically always wins on memory usage, even if it doesn't win the cpu benchmark. See: https://programming-language-benchmarks.vercel.app/go-vs-csharp https://programming-language-benchmarks.vercel.app/go-vs-csh... I tried finding more, but most benchmarks I could find were of poor quality.
letsdothisagain 3y ago
Oh sure, I can justify this easy. Labour productivity vs wages doubled since the 1970s and the trend seems to be continuing. It was about 150% in 2000 so we can use Excel as as the benchmark. This means that an accountant today can wait for Excel to load for 2 whole hours of their 8 hour shift, and still be as productive as an accountant from 20 years ago! Isn't that amazing! Technology is so cool, and our metrics for defining economic success are incredible.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  Yeah, agreed ... but[1], in purely financial terms, we are leaving money on the table, right? Just because an accountant can burn two hours a day waiting for the computer, doesn't mean that we should burn those two hours. I think that most of the tech stack is there technology-wise, just not aesthetic wise. If you are happy with how UI widgets looked an behaved on Windows 7, you can have sub-millisecond startup times now for many apps. Trouble is, people would rather wait and look at pretty things than have an uninterrupted workflow. [1] You knew there was gonna be a "but", right? Why else would I respond?
  - Karrot_Kream 3y ago
    I mean, we don't have to work 8 hours a day, we can work 10 right? 12? 18? We don't need to work 5 days a week we can work 6, maybe 6.5? It's pretty common in Japan to work 6 days a week. People like pocketing productivity bonuses and they become baked into labor expectations. It's how living standards rise.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    > Just because an accountant can burn two hours a day waiting for the computer, doesn't mean that we should burn those two hours. I think the problem is there is no economic incentive to hire people that would make excel take less than two hours. If good enough gets you the sale, then why spend money getting anything more.
    - funcDropShadow 3y ago
jtriangle 3y ago
The reason is that the money people don't want to pay for it. We absolutely have the coding talent to make efficient, maintainable code, what we don't have are the available payroll hours. 10x every project timeline and it's fixed, simple as. Granted, the big downside is, you have to keep your talent motivated and on-task 10x as long, that's like turning a quarter horse into a plough horse, it's not likely to happen quickly, if at all. You'd really need to start over with the kids who are in highschool now writing calculator apps in python by making them re-write them in C and grade them on how few lines they use. ie, it's a pipe dream, and will continue to be until we run out of hardware capability, which has been "soon" for the last 30 years, so don't hold your breath.
- runeks 3y ago
  > 10x every project timeline and it's fixed, simple as. > Granted, the big downside is, you have to keep your talent motivated and on-task 10x as long [...] No, the big downside is that you have to tell your client it'll be 10x times as expensive because you want better performance.
- jeremyjh 3y ago
  > 10x every project timeline and it's fixed, simple as. I'm skeptical. I've seen too many developers write poorly performing code purely out of indifference. If you gave them more time they'd have a lot more Reddit karma but I'd still be finding N+1 problems in every other code review.
  - WettowelReactor 3y ago
    Is it really indifference or are employees responding to incentives? Few places reward code performance. Companies are getting exactly what they pay for and missing a deadline to improve efficiency is irrational under current comp strategies.
  - therealdrag0 3y ago
    “Premature optimization…” we’re taught early on not to waste time on investigating performance.
titzer 3y ago
The wonderful thing is that the hardware performance is there if you just dare to toss the stack. One of my long-standing projects is to build a bare metal (at least as far as userspace is considered) programming language called Virgil. It can generate really tiny binaries and doesn't rely on hardly any other software (not even C!). As LLVM and V8 and even Go get piggier and piggier, it feels more magical every day.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  Is LLVM piggy? It may be big, but at the end of the day it will produce some fast binaries if fed the right thing.
  - titzer 3y ago
    Build it from source and estimate the number of CPU instructions that required.
    - kevincox 3y ago
      Name software that does nearly as good of a job for significantly faster. I think there is a huge difference between software is slow but best and class and a calculator that takes 5s to open.
    - brucethemoose2 3y ago
      But build it with what? LLVM?
- shakow 3y ago
  Isn't LLVM being a piggy good? As in only pay a hefty computational time price once upfront to stuff as many optimizations as you can in your binary, and make it fast forever after.
  - titzer 3y ago
    It takes 21 minutes to build on a 32 core machine because it's so enormous. It's a that thing translates text into binary. I love compilers; I could go into a long, drawn-out technical explanation of what it does, but really, it's a monster of insane complexity than no one can grok anymore.
lelanthran 3y ago
I keep threatening to write a GUI IM app that has 90% of what people use slack for, and make every action (other than waiting on the network) instant. Too many people are arguing that things like Slack and Linen are performing as well as could be expected due to the functionality they are providing.
- keyle 3y ago
  It existed, a startup that went under, was fully macOS native. I think this was it, "quill". https://9to5mac.com/2021/02/23/quill-chat-team-messaging-iphone-mac-apps/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/02/23/quill-chat-team-messaging-iph...
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    > It existed, a startup that went under, was fully macOS native. I think this was it, "quill". I remember that. I wonder why it didn't take off ... I wasn't intending to make an economically successful chat application. I just want something to point at whenever someone goes "Of course it has to be electron-like; how else are you going to make it cross-platform?" I want to demonstrate that, yes, you can have fast cross-platform applications without much more effort than going with electron-type designs. I want to show the source code for it, I want to have a reasonably easy to follow explanation of that source code, and I want it to be reasonably low-effort.
    - keyle 3y ago
      I'm with you on that one. I actually have a prototype full SwiftUI and Swift server as well (Vapor). Hit me up if you make progress!
      - lelanthran 3y ago
        I won't be doing it anytime soon (working on an MVP at the moment, in between gigs). But, if you send me your email (lelanthran at gmail dort com), I'll put it into my notes so that when I have something to demonstrate you'll be the first to see it :-)
chaostheory 3y ago
> Most youngish users have never even experienced true performance Most of them have never experienced the level of instability and insecurity of past computing either. Those improvements aren’t free. In the past, particularly with Windows (since this is what the videos recorded) it would be normal for my computer to freeze or crash every other hour. It happens much less today
- Narishma 3y ago
  The video is about Windows NT which did not crash or freeze every other hour.
  - chaostheory 3y ago
    It still did compared to Windows 10.
    - Narishma 3y ago
      Not in my experience.
didgetmaster 3y ago
I spent years designing and implementing a new data management system where speed was its main advantage. I painstakingly wrote performant code that relied on efficient algorithms that could manage large amounts of data (structured or unstructured). I tried to take advantage of all the hardware capabilities (caching, multiple threads, etc.). I mistakenly thought that people might flock to it once I was able to demonstrate that it was significantly faster than other systems. I couldn't have been more wrong. Even database queries that were several times faster than other systems got a big yawn by people who saw it demonstrated. No one seemed interested in why it was so fast. But people will jump on the latest 'fashionable' application, platform, or framework often no matter how slow and inefficient it is.
- IIsi50MHz 3y ago
  I'm sorry I didn't get to see it.
  - didgetmaster 3y ago
    Anyone can download it and try it out. https://www.Didgets.com https://www.Didgets.com
ssss11 3y ago
Nah, the smartest people in the world are working on ads. And ways to track you to serve more ads.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
gilbetron 3y ago
I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about "true performance" - maybe you are from an alternate reality? I don't think of the 2000s as "true performance" but rather crashes and bugs and incredibly slow loading times for tiny amounts of data. I can grep through a gigabyte text file in seconds. I couldn't even do that at all back in 2000.

Xeoncross 3y ago

People give push back when I tell them they should drop PHP for Go or Python for Rust. It doesn't matter that it would be better for everyone and the planet. It's a prisoners dilemma. I only get rewarded and promoted for shipping stuff and meeting deadlines even if the products are slow. Thank God for open source. Programmers produce amazing libraries, frameworks, languages and systems when business demands and salary is out of the picture.

jeremyjh 3y ago
Meanwhile some people have been using C# and Java for decades which perform better than Go on many benchmarks and their software is still slow as shit.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  Java and C# tend to be used for big, hairy, old projects. Thats far less common with Go.
- BigJ1211 3y ago
  I was a little skeptical of this claim, so I looked it up. C# winning happens in a handful of cases, but it's extremely rare. Go practically always wins on memory usage, even if it doesn't win the cpu benchmark. See: https://programming-language-benchmarks.vercel.app/go-vs-csharp https://programming-language-benchmarks.vercel.app/go-vs-csh... I tried finding more, but most benchmarks I could find were of poor quality.

letsdothisagain 3y ago

Oh sure, I can justify this easy. Labour productivity vs wages doubled since the 1970s and the trend seems to be continuing. It was about 150% in 2000 so we can use Excel as as the benchmark. This means that an accountant today can wait for Excel to load for 2 whole hours of their 8 hour shift, and still be as productive as an accountant from 20 years ago! Isn't that amazing! Technology is so cool, and our metrics for defining economic success are incredible.

lelanthran 3y ago
Yeah, agreed ... but[1], in purely financial terms, we are leaving money on the table, right? Just because an accountant can burn two hours a day waiting for the computer, doesn't mean that we should burn those two hours. I think that most of the tech stack is there technology-wise, just not aesthetic wise. If you are happy with how UI widgets looked an behaved on Windows 7, you can have sub-millisecond startup times now for many apps. Trouble is, people would rather wait and look at pretty things than have an uninterrupted workflow. [1] You knew there was gonna be a "but", right? Why else would I respond?
- Karrot_Kream 3y ago
  I mean, we don't have to work 8 hours a day, we can work 10 right? 12? 18? We don't need to work 5 days a week we can work 6, maybe 6.5? It's pretty common in Japan to work 6 days a week. People like pocketing productivity bonuses and they become baked into labor expectations. It's how living standards rise.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  > Just because an accountant can burn two hours a day waiting for the computer, doesn't mean that we should burn those two hours. I think the problem is there is no economic incentive to hire people that would make excel take less than two hours. If good enough gets you the sale, then why spend money getting anything more.
  - funcDropShadow 3y ago

jtriangle 3y ago

The reason is that the money people don't want to pay for it. We absolutely have the coding talent to make efficient, maintainable code, what we don't have are the available payroll hours. 10x every project timeline and it's fixed, simple as. Granted, the big downside is, you have to keep your talent motivated and on-task 10x as long, that's like turning a quarter horse into a plough horse, it's not likely to happen quickly, if at all. You'd really need to start over with the kids who are in highschool now writing calculator apps in python by making them re-write them in C and grade them on how few lines they use. ie, it's a pipe dream, and will continue to be until we run out of hardware capability, which has been "soon" for the last 30 years, so don't hold your breath.

runeks 3y ago
> 10x every project timeline and it's fixed, simple as. > Granted, the big downside is, you have to keep your talent motivated and on-task 10x as long [...] No, the big downside is that you have to tell your client it'll be 10x times as expensive because you want better performance.
jeremyjh 3y ago
> 10x every project timeline and it's fixed, simple as. I'm skeptical. I've seen too many developers write poorly performing code purely out of indifference. If you gave them more time they'd have a lot more Reddit karma but I'd still be finding N+1 problems in every other code review.
- WettowelReactor 3y ago
  Is it really indifference or are employees responding to incentives? Few places reward code performance. Companies are getting exactly what they pay for and missing a deadline to improve efficiency is irrational under current comp strategies.
- therealdrag0 3y ago
  “Premature optimization…” we’re taught early on not to waste time on investigating performance.

titzer 3y ago

The wonderful thing is that the hardware performance is there if you just dare to toss the stack. One of my long-standing projects is to build a bare metal (at least as far as userspace is considered) programming language called Virgil. It can generate really tiny binaries and doesn't rely on hardly any other software (not even C!). As LLVM and V8 and even Go get piggier and piggier, it feels more magical every day.

brucethemoose2 3y ago
Is LLVM piggy? It may be big, but at the end of the day it will produce some fast binaries if fed the right thing.
- titzer 3y ago
  Build it from source and estimate the number of CPU instructions that required.
  - kevincox 3y ago
    Name software that does nearly as good of a job for significantly faster. I think there is a huge difference between software is slow but best and class and a calculator that takes 5s to open.
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    But build it with what? LLVM?
shakow 3y ago
Isn't LLVM being a piggy good? As in only pay a hefty computational time price once upfront to stuff as many optimizations as you can in your binary, and make it fast forever after.
- titzer 3y ago
  It takes 21 minutes to build on a 32 core machine because it's so enormous. It's a that thing translates text into binary. I love compilers; I could go into a long, drawn-out technical explanation of what it does, but really, it's a monster of insane complexity than no one can grok anymore.

lelanthran 3y ago

I keep threatening to write a GUI IM app that has 90% of what people use slack for, and make every action (other than waiting on the network) instant. Too many people are arguing that things like Slack and Linen are performing as well as could be expected due to the functionality they are providing.

keyle 3y ago
It existed, a startup that went under, was fully macOS native. I think this was it, "quill". https://9to5mac.com/2021/02/23/quill-chat-team-messaging-iphone-mac-apps/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/02/23/quill-chat-team-messaging-iph...
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > It existed, a startup that went under, was fully macOS native. I think this was it, "quill". I remember that. I wonder why it didn't take off ... I wasn't intending to make an economically successful chat application. I just want something to point at whenever someone goes "Of course it has to be electron-like; how else are you going to make it cross-platform?" I want to demonstrate that, yes, you can have fast cross-platform applications without much more effort than going with electron-type designs. I want to show the source code for it, I want to have a reasonably easy to follow explanation of that source code, and I want it to be reasonably low-effort.
  - keyle 3y ago
    I'm with you on that one. I actually have a prototype full SwiftUI and Swift server as well (Vapor). Hit me up if you make progress!
    - lelanthran 3y ago
      I won't be doing it anytime soon (working on an MVP at the moment, in between gigs). But, if you send me your email (lelanthran at gmail dort com), I'll put it into my notes so that when I have something to demonstrate you'll be the first to see it :-)

chaostheory 3y ago

> Most youngish users have never even experienced true performance Most of them have never experienced the level of instability and insecurity of past computing either. Those improvements aren’t free. In the past, particularly with Windows (since this is what the videos recorded) it would be normal for my computer to freeze or crash every other hour. It happens much less today

Narishma 3y ago
The video is about Windows NT which did not crash or freeze every other hour.
- chaostheory 3y ago
  It still did compared to Windows 10.
  - Narishma 3y ago
    Not in my experience.

didgetmaster 3y ago

I spent years designing and implementing a new data management system where speed was its main advantage. I painstakingly wrote performant code that relied on efficient algorithms that could manage large amounts of data (structured or unstructured). I tried to take advantage of all the hardware capabilities (caching, multiple threads, etc.). I mistakenly thought that people might flock to it once I was able to demonstrate that it was significantly faster than other systems. I couldn't have been more wrong. Even database queries that were several times faster than other systems got a big yawn by people who saw it demonstrated. No one seemed interested in why it was so fast. But people will jump on the latest 'fashionable' application, platform, or framework often no matter how slow and inefficient it is.

IIsi50MHz 3y ago
I'm sorry I didn't get to see it.
- didgetmaster 3y ago
  Anyone can download it and try it out. https://www.Didgets.com https://www.Didgets.com

ssss11 3y ago

Nah, the smartest people in the world are working on ads. And ways to track you to serve more ads.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

gilbetron 3y ago

I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about "true performance" - maybe you are from an alternate reality? I don't think of the 2000s as "true performance" but rather crashes and bugs and incredibly slow loading times for tiny amounts of data. I can grep through a gigabyte text file in seconds. I couldn't even do that at all back in 2000.