3 ms·

We presume that what software does is far more important than how. There's a cost to waiting for a feature to be done your ideal way to your ideal standards -

by t43562 3y ago

We presume that what software does is far more important than how. There's a cost to waiting for a feature to be done your ideal way to your ideal standards - that's the cost of all the people not being able to use it while you add perfection. It's money left on the table but also just efficiency in the world economy that's being delayed. Programs were not that great in C or C++ in terms of being able to run for a long time. I fought the once-every-2-week crash bug in a C++ program - a single double memory free under certain uncommon conditions. Finding problems like that was very very unproductive. Cars, to give an example, are often made with space for all the possible optional bits even when that model will never have them - because it's more cost efficient to have a common design among several models than to redesign each one.

phaedrus 3y ago
One take I have when this topic comes up is that older, more efficient programs and assembly language instructions are the nanotechnology and atomic level of software. We just are making the same progression, backwards, that hardware technology made from bulk materials to computing with the smallest number of individual atoms. So when you see a 500 MB app doing the same thing that used to be done with 50 MB, 5 MB, or 500 KB it's kind of like looking at a 10 micrometer process CPU from the 1970s and marveling how much atoms it wastes to make a single gate when we could do the same thing with just a few atoms or fit many gates into the same footprint with 2020's era tens of nanometer processes. Of course "progressing in reverse" is the same thing as saying we're regressing.
- t43562 3y ago
  You could say that witing software at all is regressive and we should implement everything in gates at the hardware level - it would be incredibly efficient. We do this with ASICS for bitcoin etc so why not for everything? The hardware guys are working away to make hardware better all the time - whatever software people are doing. We could tell them to stop doing that, get other jobs so we could just write more efficient software . . . . but why? When they run out of things to do we will be forced to concentrate on using what we have more effectively. Before then however, the most stupid thing to do would be to leave that capability they're providing unused. as an example; I use MS Teams a lot - it's horrendous and ridiculously inefficient and I would love to have some stern words with the development team. OTOH I get lots of use out of it. It may not be the best of it's kind but it's what my company chose and it does a lot of very useful things. Better to have it than not on the whole.

by t43562 3y ago

phaedrus 3y ago

One take I have when this topic comes up is that older, more efficient programs and assembly language instructions are the nanotechnology and atomic level of software. We just are making the same progression, backwards, that hardware technology made from bulk materials to computing with the smallest number of individual atoms. So when you see a 500 MB app doing the same thing that used to be done with 50 MB, 5 MB, or 500 KB it's kind of like looking at a 10 micrometer process CPU from the 1970s and marveling how much atoms it wastes to make a single gate when we could do the same thing with just a few atoms or fit many gates into the same footprint with 2020's era tens of nanometer processes. Of course "progressing in reverse" is the same thing as saying we're regressing.

t43562 3y ago
You could say that witing software at all is regressive and we should implement everything in gates at the hardware level - it would be incredibly efficient. We do this with ASICS for bitcoin etc so why not for everything? The hardware guys are working away to make hardware better all the time - whatever software people are doing. We could tell them to stop doing that, get other jobs so we could just write more efficient software . . . . but why? When they run out of things to do we will be forced to concentrate on using what we have more effectively. Before then however, the most stupid thing to do would be to leave that capability they're providing unused. as an example; I use MS Teams a lot - it's horrendous and ridiculously inefficient and I would love to have some stern words with the development team. OTOH I get lots of use out of it. It may not be the best of it's kind but it's what my company chose and it does a lot of very useful things. Better to have it than not on the whole.