6 ms·

I feel like every time CPU speeds double, someone comes up with a Web UI framework that has twice as much indirection. With 20x slower compute, we might not hav

I feel like every time CPU speeds double, someone comes up with a Web UI framework that has twice as much indirection. With 20x slower compute, we might not have UIs that fire off an event and maybe trigger an asynchronous network request every time you type a character in a box, for example. Windows 95 could do a decently responsive desktop UI on an 80386. Coding was a lot less elegant in one way - C code that returns a HWND and all that - but with the number of levels of indirection and abstraction these days, we've made some things easier at the cost of making other things more obfuscated.

josephg 3y ago
I saw a talk about tigerbeetle the other day - which is a small, fast database for handling financial transactions that apparenty runs orders of magnitude faster than Postgres. The database binary has no dependencies and compiles to 500kb. Its authors were joking they could distribute it on floppy disks if they wanted. It’s written in Zig, not C. But that style of programming is still available to us if we want it. Even in more modern languages. Honestly I’m really tempted to try to throw together a 90s style fantasy desktop environment and widget library and make some apps for it. There’s something about that era of computing that feels great.
- red_admiral 3y ago
  Back when Java had just introduced Swing to supplement/complement AWT, I remember you had a set of components (that you could even style in different ways with themes), a fairly object-oriented approach, and with the open-source MiG layout manager (that still exists today) a powerful way of laying out forms with constraints to adapt to changing screen/window/font sizes. I feel like UI framework progress from Windows 3.1 to Swing+MiG was much greater than anything I've seen since.
  - josephg 3y ago
    I feel that way about the old Interface Builder for macos, back in the Xcode 3.x days. VB6 was pretty good too.
    - red_admiral 3y ago
      Yeah, the interface builders back then are also unsurpassed to this day. Much as I have my issues with VB as a language, the way you could build a GUI with a GUI was amazing. Better still, it worked back on school computers that of course didn't have any "programming" tools, but did come with MS office and the full VB "experience" installed for some reason.
      - Khelavaster 3y ago
        Visual Studio's wpf editor and Avalonia are beyond vb6 interface builders!
      - markus_zhang 3y ago
        Just curious, what is preventing people from creating something similar to VB6 and Delphi in modern days? Different underlying frameworks? But I'm sure VB6 still sort of works on Windows 10 (VBA).
        josephg 3y ago
        The big problem is that nobody wants yet another platform-specific UI framework. Even Microsoft is using electron (or something like it) to build Microsoft Teams. If you build a cross-platform UI framework, it'll probably end up looking a bit ugly and custom on every platform (eg Java Swing). Making a cross-platform UI toolkit that looks native everywhere is an insane amount of work, because different platforms have very different UI toolkits, with different built-in components and different platform conventions. This problem becomes 10x harder if you want to make it work on mobile as well. Some people try anyway - and bless their cotton socks. But electron (and arguably Qt) are the closest we've got. And even then, most electron apps seem to be full of custom components.
        mike_hearn 3y ago
        That's not really the cause. As you say, Electron apps don't look native either. The issues are elsewhere.
- throwaway55671 3y ago
  > Honestly I’m really tempted to try to throw together a 90s style fantasy desktop environment and widget library and make some apps for it. There’s something about that era of computing that feels great. SerenityOS might be exactly what you're looking for. Join the community and make some apps, it's great (both the community and the OS/dev experience)!
  - red_admiral 3y ago
    Is there any way to run something like "serenity's WM and file manager, but on my favorite linux distro?" Or is it all more tightly coupled than that?
    - throwaway55671 3y ago
      It's a Unix like OS with great separation of concerns. There probably is a way - their browser runs on Linux - but I don't think anyone has done it yet. Could be a fun project to look into!
- holsta 3y ago
  if [ "$os" = "Darwin" ]; then arch="universal" os="macos" elif [ "$os" = "Linux" ]; then os="linux" else echo "Unsupported OS." exit 1 fi This is nothing to emulate.
  - josephg 3y ago
    Why not? Does everything really need to be built in a cross platform way? I feel like that’s how we got into this mess.
    - holsta 3y ago
      Yes, bugs are often found by running the same code on similar but not identical platforms. We've had this conversation multiple times. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28978086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28978086 What mess are we in because of POSIX?
      - josephg 3y ago
        I’m talking about the mess of electron and friends. I’ve spoken to engineers who work on it. From their point of view, it’s the only sane way to build software that works across multiple operating systems. The nice thing about windows and macOS back in the day was that the programs we ran were all written with the same native UI toolkit. All the controls matched between applications. Applications were small and efficient - binary sizes and memory usage were in the megabyte range. Any program written like that today starts up instantly, and is incredibly responsive. But last I checked, Hello world in electron is ginormous. It uses about 100mb of memory. It takes time to start up. Vscode and Spotify are great but they don’t look or feel native. It is legitimately great that people now ship apps for Linux. But we’ve lost platform cohesion in the trade. So, so what if tigerbeetle is written for Linux? I’m ok with the developers choosing not to pay the cross platform tax.
  - arp242 3y ago
    That's just the codepath from bootstrap.sh that downloads the binaries. I don't know if it will compile and run on, say, FreeBSD. It's quite possible no one tried.
- laserbeam 3y ago
  Keep in mind, the thing that matters most for tigerbeetle’s speed is they are domain specific. They know exactly upfront how data looks like. They don’t have to be general purpose. The style of programming does work for general purpose computing, but their requirements enable a significant % of “orders of magnitude faster than postgress”.
  - vendiddy 3y ago
    While your take makes sense, I feel like even general purpose programming frameworks should be orders of magnitude faster for what they are doing.
    - josephg 3y ago
      Yeah; and we have plenty of other general purpose databases which can run laps around postgres and sqlite. There's plenty of optimisations postgres and friends leave on the table. Like, the postgres client driver could precompile queries and do query planning on behalf of the database. It would introduce some complexity, because the database would need to send information about the schema and layout at startup (and any time it changed). But that would remove a lot of unnecessary, repeated makework from the database process itself. Application servers are much easier to scale than database servers. And application servers could much more easily cache the query plan. Weirdly, I think part of the problem is economic. I think there's a lot of very smart people around with the skills to dramatically improve the performance of databases like postgresql. Across the whole economy, it would be way cheaper to pay them to optimize the code than needing companies everywhere to rent and run additional database servers. But it might not be worth it for any individual company to fund the work themselves. Without coordination (ie, opensource funding), there's not enough money to hire performance engineers, and the work just doesn't happen.
      - gregw2 3y ago
        Would odbc/jdbc protocols have to change to support client-planned queries?
    - 3y ago
- logicprog 3y ago
  > Honestly I’m really tempted to try to throw together a 90s style fantasy desktop environment and widget library and make some apps for it. There’s something about that era of computing that feels great. If you're interested in that, you should definitely check out Serenity OS!
- Froedlich 3y ago
  In 2007 I put together a bunch of servers running openSUSE 10.2. They run some specialized application software that's version-dependent and is unlikely to ever be upgraded. The working network is not connected to the internet, so there's no reason to upgrade the OS. They're full KDE installs, and openSUSE 10.2 wasn't a lightweight distribution in its day. But now, even running in VMs, UI and network response are noticeablly snappy, and are sparing of resources by modern standards.
- markus_zhang 3y ago
  Please do. I'm also wondering why no one created something similar to VB6 and Delphi.
- mwcampbell 3y ago
  Do you think you'd write your 90s style widget set and desktop environment in Rust, or do you think Rust itself tends toward bloat (in non-embedded applications)? I know you use Rust in other projects, which is why I'm asking about that language specifically.
tetris11 3y ago
I do wonder about this often. Are these new UI frameworks iterating upwards towards some unknown featureset archetype, where if given another 10-20 years, the designers will say "Okay, we've reached diminishing feature returns, let's pack it up and optimize" Or, are we simply re-inventing the wheel each time, where the set of features over the last few decades really haven't change that much or cycles through featureset phases.
- red_admiral 3y ago
  I would say, to go with the metaphor, that none of our wheels are close to round yet, and every now and again someone invents a new wheel that has a different kind of bump. Concretely, "shadow DOM", reactive (web) components and js frameworks etc. etc. are all ways of trying to get a set of rich UI components (like we're used to from desktop applications) into an environment that was originally built for static text pages, and has been expanded by patchwork ever since. DOM updates are slow and cause flickering because the original model was you submit a form and the entire page reloads; updating part of the page in response to an asynchronous request or a local event wasn't in the original design space, and every solution we've tacked on so far sucks in a slightly different way. Not helped by the complexity of being able to dynamically change the layout and size of every single element - CSS is incredibly powerful, but setting a button to have a 1px border only on hover for example has a tendency to make other page elements "jiggle" in ways you don't want.
- mywittyname 3y ago
  > Or, are we simply re-inventing the wheel each time, This is how it has been since I've been in the industry (2005). it's part of why I got out of web development; it felt like a whole lot of relearning how to do the same thing every few years. At first, there was incremental feature gains, but after a while, it felt like newer frameworks or approaches were a functional step back (i.e., NoSQL, the fact that it eventually came to stand for "not only SQL" tells all).
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  > Or, are we simply re-inventing the wheel each time, where the set of features over the last few decades really haven't change that much or cycles through featureset phases. The problem space is much larger now than it used to be. 20 years ago, you didn't care about things like responsive design, accessibility, fractional scaling, even internationalization was basic/non-existent. There's a long tail of features (often extremely complex, like accessibility) which are not immediately obvious for an english speaker with normal vision staring at a standard sized display.
passwordoops 3y ago
Jevon's Paradox applied to compute https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- aitchnyu 3y ago
  And its called Wirth's law: "What Andy [Grove] gives, Bill [Gates] takes away". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
austin-cheney 3y ago
It’s an evolving economics problem. Very few (I mean super extremely few) people really know how the web UI works without a framework and there is no incentive to know this because the more skilled a person becomes in that regard the less employable they become. As a 15 year former JavaScript developer I can see that things are changing in this regard with hiring slowing down, but there remains close to no incentive to be good at any of this. Even if you are good at this and defy all extreme expectations by finding a job that values bleeding edge performance over hiring you won’t be paid any more for the rarity of your talent/experience so why bother?
- red_admiral 3y ago
  Doesn't it make you the go-to person when something goes wrong, and someone has to debug it? My own experience from a time at a SpringBoot/iBATIS/Hibernate etc. shop (so server-side not UI side) is that it's all well and good running on "rocket fuel" as the consultants say, until something goes wrong. Then at some point you need the person who understands HTTP and SQL and other antique stuff to diagnose the problem, even if you can fix it at the abstraction layer. One of the problems we had one day, was that a particular script "just wasn't working" and it turned out the file was being sent correctly, but with the content-type set to "text/html" by mistake because someone's "clever trick" interfered with SpringBoot's "magic" so the content-type detection wasn't running the way you'd want. Easy to fix, but you need to know what's going on in the first place. Over time I also developed a feel for code smells of the form `return SomeItemDAO.fetchAll().size()` which runs just fine on the test server with a few thousand items, then you deploy it to prod where there's tens of millions and the database is on a different machine. It turns out SELECT COUNT is a thing!
  - mywittyname 3y ago
    > Doesn't it make you the go-to person when something goes wrong, and someone has to debug it? Assuming anyone cares enough. Alternative approaches include, ignoring the problem, working around it, or changing business requirements so that the feature isn't available anymore. There are a lot of people in the industry that just throw up their hands at roadblocks they can't solve and say something is not technically possible. These people include "tech leads" or other high-level software roles at companies.
alexchantavy 3y ago
It’s kinda like adding lanes on the freeway: for a time traffic is nice but people get used to it and then more people start driving and it becomes just as congested as it was before.
- ratrocket 3y ago
  Good observation. I believe the name for that is "induced demand".
  - seoulmetro 3y ago
    No, that's not what induced demand is. Induced demand is the idea that if you upgrade things, people will use it more (duh). (And it will need upgrading again shortly) The post you're replying to is just how benefits of improvements scale off with time.
- DeRock 3y ago
  Its a form of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
  - _aavaa_ 3y ago
    Yes, but Jevons paradox only says usage goes up. That usage could have gone to things that help with productivity of the end user rather than going to sluggish frameworks.
iforgotpassword 3y ago
VB6 had intellisense. sure it was much less powerful than today's, but you had a project with a dozen classes, and when you typed the name of an instance variable and then hit ".", it would immediately show you a list of accessible members of the according class and update the preselected member as you started typing. This was absolutely immediate, on a 133mhz machine with 32mb RAM. Even on 66mhz it was still usable. I remember switching to VB.NET on a 600mhz machine and the IDE was a sluggish piece of garbage.
- ansgri 3y ago
  Every IDE is a sluggish piece of garbage after Delphi 7.
  - signaru 3y ago
    I'm curious if you've used Lazarus and what you think about it. I have not used enough similar IDEs to compare it (or maybe just forgotten how it was) and didn't have access to Borland tools back in the day. One crazy thing I remember about Lazarus is how it can compile the IDE quite fast (given its codebase size) when installing plug-ins.
    - ansgri 3y ago
      Unfortunately no, had no use case for it in an industry dominated by Python and C++. Wouldn't be surprised if Lazarus is very fast and pleasant to use, and I think the problem with more popular IDEs lies in underlying technology: C++ is traditionally very slow to compile and analyze, and many popular languages are too dynamic for reliable autocompletion to be feasible. When I briefly worked with C# and Java in 2000s the IDEs were very much fully functional (compared to C++ at the time), but sluggish enough to be unpleasant without a powerful PC which I did not have — and Delphi ran fast on cheap hardware.
- ndiddy 3y ago
  I'm used to newer computers, so Visual Studio 2008 was my favorite Visual Studio. With VS 2010 and later, Microsoft decided to scrap the existing Win32 based UI and rewrite it in WPF, which made it take 20 seconds to start instead of less than a second. Even after it's started, it's far less responsive than 2008. If only Microsoft offered a "Visual Studio 2008 but with modern standards support" product...
PlunderBunny 3y ago
"It doesn't matter how much faster you make the hardware, the software guys will piss it away and then some more." - Unknown Edit: Thanks to the other comments, I can see it's a crude re-stating of Wirth's Law [0] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

josephg 3y ago

I saw a talk about tigerbeetle the other day - which is a small, fast database for handling financial transactions that apparenty runs orders of magnitude faster than Postgres. The database binary has no dependencies and compiles to 500kb. Its authors were joking they could distribute it on floppy disks if they wanted. It’s written in Zig, not C. But that style of programming is still available to us if we want it. Even in more modern languages. Honestly I’m really tempted to try to throw together a 90s style fantasy desktop environment and widget library and make some apps for it. There’s something about that era of computing that feels great.

red_admiral 3y ago
Back when Java had just introduced Swing to supplement/complement AWT, I remember you had a set of components (that you could even style in different ways with themes), a fairly object-oriented approach, and with the open-source MiG layout manager (that still exists today) a powerful way of laying out forms with constraints to adapt to changing screen/window/font sizes. I feel like UI framework progress from Windows 3.1 to Swing+MiG was much greater than anything I've seen since.
- josephg 3y ago
  I feel that way about the old Interface Builder for macos, back in the Xcode 3.x days. VB6 was pretty good too.
  - red_admiral 3y ago
    Yeah, the interface builders back then are also unsurpassed to this day. Much as I have my issues with VB as a language, the way you could build a GUI with a GUI was amazing. Better still, it worked back on school computers that of course didn't have any "programming" tools, but did come with MS office and the full VB "experience" installed for some reason.
    - Khelavaster 3y ago
      Visual Studio's wpf editor and Avalonia are beyond vb6 interface builders!
    - markus_zhang 3y ago
      Just curious, what is preventing people from creating something similar to VB6 and Delphi in modern days? Different underlying frameworks? But I'm sure VB6 still sort of works on Windows 10 (VBA).
      - josephg 3y ago
        The big problem is that nobody wants yet another platform-specific UI framework. Even Microsoft is using electron (or something like it) to build Microsoft Teams. If you build a cross-platform UI framework, it'll probably end up looking a bit ugly and custom on every platform (eg Java Swing). Making a cross-platform UI toolkit that looks native everywhere is an insane amount of work, because different platforms have very different UI toolkits, with different built-in components and different platform conventions. This problem becomes 10x harder if you want to make it work on mobile as well. Some people try anyway - and bless their cotton socks. But electron (and arguably Qt) are the closest we've got. And even then, most electron apps seem to be full of custom components.
        mike_hearn 3y ago
        That's not really the cause. As you say, Electron apps don't look native either. The issues are elsewhere.
throwaway55671 3y ago
> Honestly I’m really tempted to try to throw together a 90s style fantasy desktop environment and widget library and make some apps for it. There’s something about that era of computing that feels great. SerenityOS might be exactly what you're looking for. Join the community and make some apps, it's great (both the community and the OS/dev experience)!
- red_admiral 3y ago
  Is there any way to run something like "serenity's WM and file manager, but on my favorite linux distro?" Or is it all more tightly coupled than that?
  - throwaway55671 3y ago
    It's a Unix like OS with great separation of concerns. There probably is a way - their browser runs on Linux - but I don't think anyone has done it yet. Could be a fun project to look into!
holsta 3y ago
if [ "$os" = "Darwin" ]; then arch="universal" os="macos" elif [ "$os" = "Linux" ]; then os="linux" else echo "Unsupported OS." exit 1 fi This is nothing to emulate.
- josephg 3y ago
  Why not? Does everything really need to be built in a cross platform way? I feel like that’s how we got into this mess.
  - holsta 3y ago
    Yes, bugs are often found by running the same code on similar but not identical platforms. We've had this conversation multiple times. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28978086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28978086 What mess are we in because of POSIX?
    - josephg 3y ago
      I’m talking about the mess of electron and friends. I’ve spoken to engineers who work on it. From their point of view, it’s the only sane way to build software that works across multiple operating systems. The nice thing about windows and macOS back in the day was that the programs we ran were all written with the same native UI toolkit. All the controls matched between applications. Applications were small and efficient - binary sizes and memory usage were in the megabyte range. Any program written like that today starts up instantly, and is incredibly responsive. But last I checked, Hello world in electron is ginormous. It uses about 100mb of memory. It takes time to start up. Vscode and Spotify are great but they don’t look or feel native. It is legitimately great that people now ship apps for Linux. But we’ve lost platform cohesion in the trade. So, so what if tigerbeetle is written for Linux? I’m ok with the developers choosing not to pay the cross platform tax.
- arp242 3y ago
  That's just the codepath from bootstrap.sh that downloads the binaries. I don't know if it will compile and run on, say, FreeBSD. It's quite possible no one tried.
laserbeam 3y ago
Keep in mind, the thing that matters most for tigerbeetle’s speed is they are domain specific. They know exactly upfront how data looks like. They don’t have to be general purpose. The style of programming does work for general purpose computing, but their requirements enable a significant % of “orders of magnitude faster than postgress”.
- vendiddy 3y ago
  While your take makes sense, I feel like even general purpose programming frameworks should be orders of magnitude faster for what they are doing.
  - josephg 3y ago
    Yeah; and we have plenty of other general purpose databases which can run laps around postgres and sqlite. There's plenty of optimisations postgres and friends leave on the table. Like, the postgres client driver could precompile queries and do query planning on behalf of the database. It would introduce some complexity, because the database would need to send information about the schema and layout at startup (and any time it changed). But that would remove a lot of unnecessary, repeated makework from the database process itself. Application servers are much easier to scale than database servers. And application servers could much more easily cache the query plan. Weirdly, I think part of the problem is economic. I think there's a lot of very smart people around with the skills to dramatically improve the performance of databases like postgresql. Across the whole economy, it would be way cheaper to pay them to optimize the code than needing companies everywhere to rent and run additional database servers. But it might not be worth it for any individual company to fund the work themselves. Without coordination (ie, opensource funding), there's not enough money to hire performance engineers, and the work just doesn't happen.
    - gregw2 3y ago
      Would odbc/jdbc protocols have to change to support client-planned queries?
  - 3y ago
logicprog 3y ago
> Honestly I’m really tempted to try to throw together a 90s style fantasy desktop environment and widget library and make some apps for it. There’s something about that era of computing that feels great. If you're interested in that, you should definitely check out Serenity OS!
Froedlich 3y ago
In 2007 I put together a bunch of servers running openSUSE 10.2. They run some specialized application software that's version-dependent and is unlikely to ever be upgraded. The working network is not connected to the internet, so there's no reason to upgrade the OS. They're full KDE installs, and openSUSE 10.2 wasn't a lightweight distribution in its day. But now, even running in VMs, UI and network response are noticeablly snappy, and are sparing of resources by modern standards.
markus_zhang 3y ago
Please do. I'm also wondering why no one created something similar to VB6 and Delphi.
mwcampbell 3y ago
Do you think you'd write your 90s style widget set and desktop environment in Rust, or do you think Rust itself tends toward bloat (in non-embedded applications)? I know you use Rust in other projects, which is why I'm asking about that language specifically.

tetris11 3y ago

I do wonder about this often. Are these new UI frameworks iterating upwards towards some unknown featureset archetype, where if given another 10-20 years, the designers will say "Okay, we've reached diminishing feature returns, let's pack it up and optimize" Or, are we simply re-inventing the wheel each time, where the set of features over the last few decades really haven't change that much or cycles through featureset phases.

red_admiral 3y ago
I would say, to go with the metaphor, that none of our wheels are close to round yet, and every now and again someone invents a new wheel that has a different kind of bump. Concretely, "shadow DOM", reactive (web) components and js frameworks etc. etc. are all ways of trying to get a set of rich UI components (like we're used to from desktop applications) into an environment that was originally built for static text pages, and has been expanded by patchwork ever since. DOM updates are slow and cause flickering because the original model was you submit a form and the entire page reloads; updating part of the page in response to an asynchronous request or a local event wasn't in the original design space, and every solution we've tacked on so far sucks in a slightly different way. Not helped by the complexity of being able to dynamically change the layout and size of every single element - CSS is incredibly powerful, but setting a button to have a 1px border only on hover for example has a tendency to make other page elements "jiggle" in ways you don't want.
mywittyname 3y ago
> Or, are we simply re-inventing the wheel each time, This is how it has been since I've been in the industry (2005). it's part of why I got out of web development; it felt like a whole lot of relearning how to do the same thing every few years. At first, there was incremental feature gains, but after a while, it felt like newer frameworks or approaches were a functional step back (i.e., NoSQL, the fact that it eventually came to stand for "not only SQL" tells all).
The_Colonel 3y ago
> Or, are we simply re-inventing the wheel each time, where the set of features over the last few decades really haven't change that much or cycles through featureset phases. The problem space is much larger now than it used to be. 20 years ago, you didn't care about things like responsive design, accessibility, fractional scaling, even internationalization was basic/non-existent. There's a long tail of features (often extremely complex, like accessibility) which are not immediately obvious for an english speaker with normal vision staring at a standard sized display.

passwordoops 3y ago

Jevon's Paradox applied to compute https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

aitchnyu 3y ago
And its called Wirth's law: "What Andy [Grove] gives, Bill [Gates] takes away". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

austin-cheney 3y ago

It’s an evolving economics problem. Very few (I mean super extremely few) people really know how the web UI works without a framework and there is no incentive to know this because the more skilled a person becomes in that regard the less employable they become. As a 15 year former JavaScript developer I can see that things are changing in this regard with hiring slowing down, but there remains close to no incentive to be good at any of this. Even if you are good at this and defy all extreme expectations by finding a job that values bleeding edge performance over hiring you won’t be paid any more for the rarity of your talent/experience so why bother?

red_admiral 3y ago
Doesn't it make you the go-to person when something goes wrong, and someone has to debug it? My own experience from a time at a SpringBoot/iBATIS/Hibernate etc. shop (so server-side not UI side) is that it's all well and good running on "rocket fuel" as the consultants say, until something goes wrong. Then at some point you need the person who understands HTTP and SQL and other antique stuff to diagnose the problem, even if you can fix it at the abstraction layer. One of the problems we had one day, was that a particular script "just wasn't working" and it turned out the file was being sent correctly, but with the content-type set to "text/html" by mistake because someone's "clever trick" interfered with SpringBoot's "magic" so the content-type detection wasn't running the way you'd want. Easy to fix, but you need to know what's going on in the first place. Over time I also developed a feel for code smells of the form `return SomeItemDAO.fetchAll().size()` which runs just fine on the test server with a few thousand items, then you deploy it to prod where there's tens of millions and the database is on a different machine. It turns out SELECT COUNT is a thing!
- mywittyname 3y ago
  > Doesn't it make you the go-to person when something goes wrong, and someone has to debug it? Assuming anyone cares enough. Alternative approaches include, ignoring the problem, working around it, or changing business requirements so that the feature isn't available anymore. There are a lot of people in the industry that just throw up their hands at roadblocks they can't solve and say something is not technically possible. These people include "tech leads" or other high-level software roles at companies.

alexchantavy 3y ago

It’s kinda like adding lanes on the freeway: for a time traffic is nice but people get used to it and then more people start driving and it becomes just as congested as it was before.

ratrocket 3y ago
Good observation. I believe the name for that is "induced demand".
- seoulmetro 3y ago
  No, that's not what induced demand is. Induced demand is the idea that if you upgrade things, people will use it more (duh). (And it will need upgrading again shortly) The post you're replying to is just how benefits of improvements scale off with time.
DeRock 3y ago
Its a form of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- _aavaa_ 3y ago
  Yes, but Jevons paradox only says usage goes up. That usage could have gone to things that help with productivity of the end user rather than going to sluggish frameworks.

iforgotpassword 3y ago

VB6 had intellisense. sure it was much less powerful than today's, but you had a project with a dozen classes, and when you typed the name of an instance variable and then hit ".", it would immediately show you a list of accessible members of the according class and update the preselected member as you started typing. This was absolutely immediate, on a 133mhz machine with 32mb RAM. Even on 66mhz it was still usable. I remember switching to VB.NET on a 600mhz machine and the IDE was a sluggish piece of garbage.

ansgri 3y ago
Every IDE is a sluggish piece of garbage after Delphi 7.
- signaru 3y ago
  I'm curious if you've used Lazarus and what you think about it. I have not used enough similar IDEs to compare it (or maybe just forgotten how it was) and didn't have access to Borland tools back in the day. One crazy thing I remember about Lazarus is how it can compile the IDE quite fast (given its codebase size) when installing plug-ins.
  - ansgri 3y ago
    Unfortunately no, had no use case for it in an industry dominated by Python and C++. Wouldn't be surprised if Lazarus is very fast and pleasant to use, and I think the problem with more popular IDEs lies in underlying technology: C++ is traditionally very slow to compile and analyze, and many popular languages are too dynamic for reliable autocompletion to be feasible. When I briefly worked with C# and Java in 2000s the IDEs were very much fully functional (compared to C++ at the time), but sluggish enough to be unpleasant without a powerful PC which I did not have — and Delphi ran fast on cheap hardware.
ndiddy 3y ago
I'm used to newer computers, so Visual Studio 2008 was my favorite Visual Studio. With VS 2010 and later, Microsoft decided to scrap the existing Win32 based UI and rewrite it in WPF, which made it take 20 seconds to start instead of less than a second. Even after it's started, it's far less responsive than 2008. If only Microsoft offered a "Visual Studio 2008 but with modern standards support" product...

PlunderBunny 3y ago

"It doesn't matter how much faster you make the hardware, the software guys will piss it away and then some more." - Unknown Edit: Thanks to the other comments, I can see it's a crude re-stating of Wirth's Law [0] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law