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Niklaus Wirth wrote about this in 1995, in his essay A Plea for Lean Software. About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little

Niklaus Wirth wrote about this in 1995, in his essay A Plea for Lean Software. About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage. (Modern program editors request 100 times that much). An operating system had to manage with 8,000 bytes, and a compiler had to fit into 32 Kbytes, whereas their modern descendants require megabytes. Has all this inflated software become any faster? On the contrary, were it not for a thousand times faster hardware, modern software would be utterly unusable. https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/1995/02/r2064/13rRUwInv7E https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/1995/02/r2064/13rR... That said, as someone fairly young, I still don't think that makes it wrong or something only an old man would think. Software seems to perform exactly as well as it needs to and no more, which is why hardware advances don't make our computers run software much faster.

joelwilliamson 1y ago
“What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away”
nextos 1y ago
Aside from slowness, feature creep leads to poor quality, i.e. tons of bugs and user confusion with ever-changing graphical interfaces. If software was simpler, we could afford to offer some formal guarantees of correctness. Model check protocols, verify pre and post conditions à la Dafny, etc. There's too much change for the sake of change.
- aylmao 1y ago
  > There's too much change for the sake of change. +1 to this. Like a lot of issues, I think the root is ideological, but this one in particular very clearly manifests organizationally. The companies building everyday software are ever bigger— full of software engineers, designers and various kinds of managers who are asked to justify their generous salaries. At an individual level I'm sure there's all sorts of cases, but at a general level there's almost no other option but to introduce change for the sake of change.
  - etruong42 1y ago
    This is exactly what I see as well. At a general level, I believe there are other options - changes/features need to meet some level of usage or it is scrapped out of recognition that supporting all these features make bugs more likely, performance likely to degrade, increase difficulty of adding features, make the product more difficult to use, etc.
- aylmao 1y ago
  > There's too much change for the sake of change. +1 to this. Like a lot of issues, I think the root is ideological, but this one in particular very clearly manifests organizationally. The companies building everyday software are ever bigger— full of software engineers, designers and various kinds of managers who are asked to justify their generous salaries. At an individual level I'm sure there's all sorts of cases, but at a general level there's often almost no other option but to introduce change for the sake of change.
  - chipsrafferty 1y ago
    I once asked a man who worked in marketing why Oreos keep making crazy new flavors like "sour patch kids Oreos" when the normal kind is great and clearly has no issues being sold. I could see some upside - it gets people talking about them, it's fun, it reinforces the normal flavor as the best chocolate cookie, etc. but I was still dubious that those benefits outweighed the cost of developing new flavors in a lab, paperwork for food safety, a new manufacturing process, new ads, new packaging, etc. especially for something temporary. He said it's often just some new marketing exec wants to put something on their resume, and they have certain metrics that they target that don't necessarily align with long term profits of the company. I'm sure software has a similar problem.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
naikrovek 1y ago
software authors that don't care about performance annoy me (and I am an old man.) The amount of things a computer can do in a single thread are amazing, and computers now have a dozen or more threads to do work. If developers cared about performance, things would easily be 20x as performant as they are today. I'm not talking about "write in assembly, duh" I'm talking about just doing things intelligently instead of naively. The developers I support often simply are not thinking about the problem they're solving and they solve the problem in the simplest way (for them) and not the simplest way for a computer. Software is an inefficiency amplifier, because the number of developers for a piece of code is much smaller than the number of computers that run that code; how much coal has been burned solely because of shitty implementations? I'd wager that the answer is "a LOT!" Even if you don't care about coal usage, think about how much happier your users would be if your application was suddenly 5x faster than it was previously? now think of how many customers want their software to be slow (outside of TheDailyWTF): zero. languages like javascript and python remove you so much from the CPU and the cache that even if you were thinking of those things, you can't do anything about it. JS and Electron are great for developers, and horrible for users because of that amplification I described above. I am dead tired of seeing hustle culture overtake everything in this field, and important things, to me, like quality and performance and support all fall straight down the toilet simply because executives want to release features faster. things like copilot could help with this, i hope. presumably copilot will help introduce better code into applications than a daydreaming developer would, though the existence of vibe coding sort of nulls that out probably. one thing that AI will do quite soon is increase the amount of software that exists quite dramatically. and I am kinda concerned about the possibility that it's all going to suck horribly.
- ralphc 1y ago
  What's your proposal for a "compromise" language between programmer productivity and performance, especially for multiple threads and CPUs? Go, Rust, a BEAM language?
  - t917910 1y ago
    [flagged]
vacuity 1y ago
I'm also young and heavily favor simple, quality software. Age is a highly coarse proxy for one's experiences, but in this case I think it has more to do with my personality. I have enough experience in computing that I don't think I'm making demands that are unrealistic, although they are certainly unrealistic if we maintain current incentives and motives.
etruong42 1y ago
> Software seems to perform exactly as well as it needs to and no more The cynical spin I would put on this idea is that software performs as poorly as it can get away with. MSFT is feeling the need/pressure to have Office load faster, and they will try to get away with preloading it. Otherwise, there is a strong pull towards bloat that different people will try to take credit for as features even if the cumulative experience of all these "features" is actually a worse user-experience.

joelwilliamson 1y ago

“What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away”

nextos 1y ago

Aside from slowness, feature creep leads to poor quality, i.e. tons of bugs and user confusion with ever-changing graphical interfaces. If software was simpler, we could afford to offer some formal guarantees of correctness. Model check protocols, verify pre and post conditions à la Dafny, etc. There's too much change for the sake of change.

aylmao 1y ago
> There's too much change for the sake of change. +1 to this. Like a lot of issues, I think the root is ideological, but this one in particular very clearly manifests organizationally. The companies building everyday software are ever bigger— full of software engineers, designers and various kinds of managers who are asked to justify their generous salaries. At an individual level I'm sure there's all sorts of cases, but at a general level there's almost no other option but to introduce change for the sake of change.
- etruong42 1y ago
  This is exactly what I see as well. At a general level, I believe there are other options - changes/features need to meet some level of usage or it is scrapped out of recognition that supporting all these features make bugs more likely, performance likely to degrade, increase difficulty of adding features, make the product more difficult to use, etc.
aylmao 1y ago
> There's too much change for the sake of change. +1 to this. Like a lot of issues, I think the root is ideological, but this one in particular very clearly manifests organizationally. The companies building everyday software are ever bigger— full of software engineers, designers and various kinds of managers who are asked to justify their generous salaries. At an individual level I'm sure there's all sorts of cases, but at a general level there's often almost no other option but to introduce change for the sake of change.
- chipsrafferty 1y ago
  I once asked a man who worked in marketing why Oreos keep making crazy new flavors like "sour patch kids Oreos" when the normal kind is great and clearly has no issues being sold. I could see some upside - it gets people talking about them, it's fun, it reinforces the normal flavor as the best chocolate cookie, etc. but I was still dubious that those benefits outweighed the cost of developing new flavors in a lab, paperwork for food safety, a new manufacturing process, new ads, new packaging, etc. especially for something temporary. He said it's often just some new marketing exec wants to put something on their resume, and they have certain metrics that they target that don't necessarily align with long term profits of the company. I'm sure software has a similar problem.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

naikrovek 1y ago

software authors that don't care about performance annoy me (and I am an old man.) The amount of things a computer can do in a single thread are amazing, and computers now have a dozen or more threads to do work. If developers cared about performance, things would easily be 20x as performant as they are today. I'm not talking about "write in assembly, duh" I'm talking about just doing things intelligently instead of naively. The developers I support often simply are not thinking about the problem they're solving and they solve the problem in the simplest way (for them) and not the simplest way for a computer. Software is an inefficiency amplifier, because the number of developers for a piece of code is much smaller than the number of computers that run that code; how much coal has been burned solely because of shitty implementations? I'd wager that the answer is "a LOT!" Even if you don't care about coal usage, think about how much happier your users would be if your application was suddenly 5x faster than it was previously? now think of how many customers want their software to be slow (outside of TheDailyWTF): zero. languages like javascript and python remove you so much from the CPU and the cache that even if you were thinking of those things, you can't do anything about it. JS and Electron are great for developers, and horrible for users because of that amplification I described above. I am dead tired of seeing hustle culture overtake everything in this field, and important things, to me, like quality and performance and support all fall straight down the toilet simply because executives want to release features faster. things like copilot could help with this, i hope. presumably copilot will help introduce better code into applications than a daydreaming developer would, though the existence of vibe coding sort of nulls that out probably. one thing that AI will do quite soon is increase the amount of software that exists quite dramatically. and I am kinda concerned about the possibility that it's all going to suck horribly.

ralphc 1y ago
What's your proposal for a "compromise" language between programmer productivity and performance, especially for multiple threads and CPUs? Go, Rust, a BEAM language?
- t917910 1y ago
  [flagged]

vacuity 1y ago

I'm also young and heavily favor simple, quality software. Age is a highly coarse proxy for one's experiences, but in this case I think it has more to do with my personality. I have enough experience in computing that I don't think I'm making demands that are unrealistic, although they are certainly unrealistic if we maintain current incentives and motives.

etruong42 1y ago

> Software seems to perform exactly as well as it needs to and no more The cynical spin I would put on this idea is that software performs as poorly as it can get away with. MSFT is feeling the need/pressure to have Office load faster, and they will try to get away with preloading it. Otherwise, there is a strong pull towards bloat that different people will try to take credit for as features even if the cumulative experience of all these "features" is actually a worse user-experience.