The referenced AppSignal post about 13,000 dependencies for a todo list is conflating dependencies required for the build tooling with dependencies that are actually bundled in to the web app.
It's also hilarious that right after referencing the dependency problem in the JS ecosystem the OP then goes and advocates splitting up your library into a bunch of mini libraries. That's exactly how we got into this mess in the first place.
Also, computer speed has definitely gotten faster. There was a time period during which this was not the case, but particularly the switch to SSDs resulted in a massive jump in computer responsiveness. (The previous jump happened when we no longer needed to wait for dial up to establish a connection)
I agree with the core point of the article, but I agree with your points as well. The conclusion of the article is definitely wrong.
I recently buddied up with someone who has a CS degree to try and make a desktop app, as a side project. I asked if he is familiar with MariaDB and whether or not he's used C++ ODBC.
Our discussion quickly turned into choosing libraries / existing code. He uses Spring and Hibernate and was bewildered by the concept of tying columns to application variables "manually". After I told him I have some CentOS servers where we could put a shared database, he bought a Windows Server because he "needs a GUI". He added, "Ideally, after it's setup, we'll never even have to remote in to it." For the actual desktop application, he wants to use Electron.
It seems there are two distinct branches of computing emerging - one where performance matters, and one where it doesn't. Performance will always matter in places like the stock market or on IBM mainframes. In the consumer-facing world, All that seems to matter is perceived performance. Slack and Discord seem fast, when you watch how quickly a new message pops up on your laptop screen after you sent it on your phone. They seem egregiously slow when you open up task manager and see just how much overhead the chromium-based engine adds -- but most people won't care.
Applications made for "consumers" tend to be made like a cheap car - corners are cut, the end result isn't pretty, but things in the category are what makes up 90% of ordinary use cases. Slack isn't meant to be open on your work machine while you're compiling code in the same way a Prius isn't meant to chauffeur top-level executives. It doesn't mean that the Prius is bad or unimportant - it will do far more for more people than the entire lineup of many luxury car brands.
But I am damn sure that I'd rather be engineering a Bentley than a Prius.
Edit: In the metaphor, luxury and performance are sacrificed, not efficiency. I probably should've used Fiat Chrysler, but unlike Fiat Chrysler, consumer-facing software has its place. I just don't enjoy working on it myself.
In my experience what the switch to SSDs resulted into was Windows 10 becoming practically unusable on a mechanical HDD. Comparing how long the OS needs to start up, launch applications, etc on my laptop with Win10 vs a much older laptop with Win8 (the first and last time Microsoft bothered to optimize Windows the last decade) is night and day and that older laptop originally came with Vista!
When i first installed Win8 on that laptop i was so impressed i even took a video[0] of it (and yes, it seems like they kept that performance in 8, though sadly by 8.1 it became slower).
The referenced AppSignal post about 13,000 dependencies for a todo list is conflating dependencies required for the build tooling with dependencies that are actually bundled in to the web app.
The point is that a dependency is a dependency, and making software needlessly complex in any way is bad.
I've run into this a lot with open source stuff (not even JavaScript, just native code): I want to fix/modify something, and I know it's open-source, so it should be easy, right? After looking at the sprawling dependency tree, and the effort it would take to set up a build environment --- which might not even give me the same output as the original binaries, which are working perfectly fine except for the part I want to change --- I decide I'll just find the locations with a debugger and patch the binary directly.
tl;dr: the complaint is equally valid when applied to build tools, which are themselves also software and becoming bloated.
Sure there are two types (or more?) of dependencies, but at the end of the day the AppSignal app requires those +13,000 dependencies in order to work properly (first to build it, and then to run it). That's horrendous.
I was expecting Moore's Law to give us a renaissance in algorithmic thinking, but The Cloud has shown me I was wrong. First, we're going to have to fully explore Amdahl's law.
Eventually every problem goes to logn time, best case. The logn factor shows up over and over, from constraints on on-chip cache to communication delays to adding numbers of arbitrary size. We make a lot of problems look like they are O(1) until the moment they don't fit into one machine word, one cache line, one cache, into memory, onto one machine, onto one switch, into one rack, into one room, into one data center, into one zip code, onto one planet.
If we can't solve the problem for all customers, we dodge, pick a smaller more lucrative problem that only works for a subset of our customers, and then pretend like we can solve any problem we want to, we just didn't want to solve that problem.
Herb Sutter had a wonderful talk on constant factor plague. As much as I like clojure and similar convenience and algorithmic beauty.. I can appreciate the devil-is-in-the-details much more since this video (forgot the title sorry)
It's the same freaking fallacy I see again and again on here - It's simple, easy to understand, and dead fucking wrong.
The vast majority of the complexity you're dealing with in modern computing comes from three sources. In the order of impact
1. Networking. It turns out there are real and hard limits on how fast we can pass data around over copper wires. Fiber is better, but you just literally cannot move faster than light, and latency is a big deal when the items you're accessing and changing live somewhere else (and basically everything of value does live somewhere else, or thinks you are "somewhere else").
2. Security. This is a direct consequence of number 1. When everything is connected, everything is connected. You can't just lock the lab door and call it a day now.
3. Compatibility. This is a direct consequence of both 1 and 2. Value is a consequence of compatibility (this is why a good chunk of you on here still support IE, even though you don't want to). We have more devices, of more kinds than ever before.
We have more people, with more use cases than ever before. There is value in being as compatible as possible with all those devices and people.
All those devices are connected in ways designed to keep them compatible, but also secure. It turns out this is not an easy task.
If you'd like to go wank off over how fast your pre-network, unsecured, unsupported, inaccessible and manually configured systems are, be my guest (oh, and I hope you read english...). The rest of us will continue to produce items of value.
No, it's the other way around. Advances in computer hardware have allowed the use more inefficient programming languages allowing more inexperienced and unskilled programmers to create programs leading to more resource hungry programs. When there are little resource constraints the only real constraint becomes developer time.
I don't see how having IDEs implemented in browsers has anything to do with security, the speed of light or compatibility. It's just the lack of constraints allowed by advances in computer hardware.
Most software is written with no performance considerations in mind at first and the performance issues are addressed only when they become visible. However, if there is abundant memory available, why bother?
Networking isn't the bottleneck. As John Carmack quipped, "I can send an IP packet to Europe faster than I can send a pixel to the screen. How f’d up is that?"
Usually if there is latency caused by networking in an application it's usually unneeded roundtrips caused by inefficient programmers or inefficient layers in the software stack.
None of the above require software to be as slow as it often is.
Windows being able to run Win32 applications isn't what makes Windows Calc slow nor is anything else you mentioned - you do not need a supercomputer to download currency conversion rates (which, btw, is bloat by itself and could be handled by a dedicated program instead of being shoved into calc) and even the ability to download a CSV or whatever from a remote server via HTTPS (all you'd really need to make such an update) is something the OS can provide to every application and keep secure for everyone (and you know what, this sort of functionality was something Windows provided ever since Win98, but how many people use it vs bundling their own?).
Your list is interesting because of how it overlaps with yet reframes mine (from http://akkartik.name/about):
A. Backwards compatibility considerations. Early mistakes in the design of an interface are often perpetuated indefinitely. Supporting them takes code. Projects that add many new features also accumulate many missteps. Over time the weight of these past adaptations starts to prevent future adaptation.
B. Churn in personnel. If a project lasts long enough early contributors eventually leave and are replaced by new ones. The new ones have holes in their knowledge of the codebase, all the different facilities provided, the reasons why design decisions were made just so. Peter Naur pointed out back in 1985 (http://akkartik.name/naur.pdf) the odd fact that that no matter how much documentation we write, we can't seem to help newcomers understand our programs without talking to the original authors. In-person interactive conversations tend to be a precious resource; there's only so many of them newcomers can have before they need to start contributing to a project, and there's only so much bandwidth the old hands have to review changes for unnecessary complexity or over-engineering. Personnel churn is a lossy process; every generation of programmers on a project tends to know less about it, and to be less in control of it.
C. Vestigial features. Even after accounting for compatibility considerations, projects past a certain age often have features that can be removed. However, such simplification rarely happens because of the risk of regressions. We forget precisely why we did what we did, and that forces us to choose between reintroducing regressions or continuing to cargo-cult old solutions long after they've become unnecessary.
---
I can't really rebut anything you say. I'm going to keep it on my radar as I go about my project. It's currently pre-network, unsecured and inaccessible. And will always be manually configured, for reasons described in the link. But it's supported, for what that's worth.
1. Networking isn't the number one source of complexity, since local apps can be bloated, slow, buggy, and complex.
2. Security is not a consequence of networking. A non-networked system can be insecure, and a networked system can be secure. Security is more normally viewed in the context of confidentiallity, integrity, and availibility along with the concepts of authentication, authorization, and accountability.
3. Compatibility is not a consequence of either networking or security.
Your comment makes it seem that you believe complexity comes from having to adhere to constraints. That attitude is the issue! Not wanting to adhere to constraints is why software is bloated, complex, full of thousands of components, slow, etc.
The speed of a signal in wire or fiber is largely irrelevant. Most of your latency is taken going up and down your ginormous software stack. Take a look at what is required for wire-speed processing.
Security is improved by reducing the number of disparate components.
Regarding 3, I think part of the problem of ecosystem fragmentation has to do with large tech companies finding their favorite niche and being reluctant to compete with each other.
I have a theory that this has something to do with incentives: competition can be good for the company that is able to grab another's territory, but on average it's usually a loss. That's especially true from the perspective of shareholders, most of whom don't just hold one stock but many. Some competition is necessary, but too much is inefficient. If you own stock in both Apple and Google, you're happy with them each having their own group of loyal phone buyers. Spending more money than necessary to try to attract the other company's customers to switch is almost a pure loss from the point of view of the shareholder. Companies might not explicitly collude to divide markets (which would be against anti-trust law), but they're still subject to the disapproval of their shareholders if they rock the boat too much. Sometimes I think it makes more sense to think of all publicly-traded companies as being a sort of loosely-structured single corporation rather than truly separate competing entities.
So we have all these different software ecosystems that all these different businesses have built their respective walled gardens around, but software developers suffer because they can't just write to one platform and have their application be portable. Instead, they need a totally different application if they want to be accessible to desktop PC users, Android, iPhone, the web, tablets, servers, enterprise customers, HPC, cloud, game consoles and so on. Sure those users all have different needs, but surely they could have quite a bit more cross-platform consistency and common tools and standards than what we have now.
The argument got rather confused at the end. The todo list has 13,000 dependencies precisely because the NPM community follows the advice here to create many small libraries. So is that supposed to be a good or bad thing?
Yeah...not sure where they were going there. The many small libraries becomes a problem when said libs go out of sync, i mean that is where dependency hell bites.
>A good way to start would be to split up libraries. Instead of creating one big library that does everything you could ever possibly need, just create many libraries. Your god-like library could still exist, but solely as a wrapper.
This isn't it. It's literally what is creating the problem.
Small libraries mean duplication, a lack of shared abstractions and dependency hell.
The reason garbage collection was such a huge win is that before that every C library shipped with it's own completely different way of managing memory, that's a nightmare.
We need bigger libraries providing better abstractions that are reused through out and written to allow composition and dead code elimination('tree shaking' for the JS crowd) to work well. So you can opt in to functionality you need and opt out of functionality you don't need.
Communities working on big libraries can actually do good release planning, backwards compatibility and timely deprecations. React is a example of a library that does a really good job of this. All the smaller libraries in the JS ecosystem are the cause of the pain in modern JS development.
I think we should continually fold new libraries into the language. Basically "batteries included", collapse the dependency tree.
I found that the standard python library has enormous functionality that makes it possible to solve many problems in a self-contained fashion.
This sort of solution will give you a big toolbox spread out in front of you. You will be less likely to re-invent the wheel. Many eyes on the standard library may lead to optimizations used by everyone.
And it makes it possible to share effectively. You can talk about functions with others using common terms. You can share your code and it will work in other environments. Education can teach in an unambiguous fashion.
> 1995 was the year in which programmers stopped thinking about the quality of their programs.
Oh, please. There are some good points in the article but that hyperbole was unnecessary. I was programming in 1995, and nobody stopped thinking about the quality of their software.
I’ve been programming since 1965, read Dijkstra, Niklaus Wirth. And these days I break software at people’s request. There is in fact much less concern and emphasis on quality these days.
It is also interesting to note that Knuth also does not do libraries
Proliferation of hyperboles has gone out of control, hard to read news, and watch YouTube videos without writers/content creators, or even normal people speak in daily life without this very annoying pattern. I think problem is worse among our American cousins, than elsewhere in the English speaking world.
Well if you have to pick a line, a point in time where the industry crossed a threshold, I'd say the author picked a good one.
There were people who didn't care about software quality in 1960 and there will be people who do in 2060, so no matter what year he chose, a lot of people would dismiss any chosen year as hyperbole.
As time moves forward, and more "healthy" ecosystems grow up around languages (like unwanted mold or fungus always does) software is going to get slower and slower and slower. And saying that it's a problem will always be an "old man is shouting nonsense again" moment to most young developers.
It's like they never actually ran Windows 95 and had the experience of people accepting your operating system crashing daily. It was much more reliable than Windows 3.1 after all (and to be fair to MS, was also more reliable than MacOS System 7 and ran faster than OS2).
There's always been good software and bad software.
There is an analogous problem in city design, wherein it was discovered that it was empirically not possible to get the average commute down below a certain time, because as more roads were built people moved further away from town. If you build more lanes to your roads, you don't get a faster commute, you get more sprawl.
People spend time making software less bloated, when it's the number one problem they have. When hardware speed is taking care of making that only the #2 or #3 problem they have, then they will work on whatever the #1 problem is, meanwhile adding more software bloat.
When Moore's Law once and for all stops, due to some law of physics reason, then software bloat will become a priority. Until then, other things are.
I guess it's more of a natural selection process - the software house which can deliver a good enough working piece will (nearly) always beat the one which adds another two years of development time (and cost) to make the app a bit snappier. Ask Lotus Notes and Netscape.
I don't want to say that performance does not matter at all - it does - but with hardware being as cheap as it is and developer time and time-to-market being as expensive, optimizing that last 500ms and 200MB out simply is not going to be worth it.
And let's not disregard the expense of performance optimization - you'll not only need a reference to benchmark and test against, but also spend a lot of time debugging and writing very plattform-specific code with tons of edge cases. It's not like saving 2GB of memory comes for free.
What gets me is part of the '95 quote about computing in the 70s
"About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage"
Such a text editor likely couldn't handle lowercase in English, let alone any other Latin script language, let alone cjkv or bi-di. The bloat in software of 95 and the present day is real, but there is no real effort to make an apples to apples comparison in what our expectations of software are, and it massively weakens the argument
Parallel arguments can clearly be made for compilers etc.
A lot of these are less than 8K, none of them can't handle lowercase, and I bet the majority of them will be fine with "high CP437" bytes (so other Latin languages.)
The main question is what should you do with all that application code space other than make the functionality of your core application richer? (adding Unicode is a perfect example - do that and for English language use, the app might seem identical but it's become much richer).
What use would one million, highly functional, stand-alone 8K programs be? What about a hundred thousand 80K programs?
I'd love wholly new categories of software to just pop up. I think about what those might be. But it seems like actually they appear quite seldom. So what else is there to do but throw code at what people use every day, for marginal improvements in existing functionality.
That text editor seems to have been enough for Wirth to create the Pascal and Oberon languages. VI came out in 1976. Even today, lots of people use VI or some derivative of it.
There are many complaints but there doesn't seem to be a real movement to make/use/cultivate small and fast software for all purposes.
I'd join.
Fragmented parts could be suckless.org, old cheap thinkpads from ebay, fast Linux distros, unix command line tools, retrocomputing, raspberry pi; all things with communities and fans who like a certain quality, simplicity and the good old days.
Someone could write a manifesto. I hear clock cycles are bad for the environment. And what if we want to run that software on our spaceship on the way to A Centauri?
Software speed is a usability feature, and usability is a subset of economic value.
It turns out, people are perfectly happy to put up with slightly slower software for all of the other benefits we get from modern software: rapid development, rapid deployability, ease of code comprehension, and more.
When users complain about slow software enough to buy a different product (in whatever variation of 'buy' that may be) then it becomes a high priority thing to fix. Software today is precisely as fast as it needs to be- and no more, typically.
To me, this article is just the software engineer's version of Grandpa complaining that things were better in the old days- he's ignoring the reasons why things changed.
>people are perfectly happy to put up with slightly slower software for all of the other benefits we get from modern software
I don't think this is true. I think this is more of a 'boiling frog' situation. Increase the temperature one degree at a time and it won't jump out of the pot.
Every individual piece of software slowly eating up more resources is something the user barely notices or doesn't even attribute to the software in question, but give it a few years and everything grinds to a halt, and people very much dislike this, hence the infamous 'Windows rot' that everyone has suffered from at one point of their lives.
"In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand.[1]"
See modern IRC clients that take 500MB of memory on the desktop. Compare with Orcad Capture a mid 90's schematic capture program that would run acceptably on a 486 with 16MB of memory.
There’s a few issues with this post. It starts off great but falls down hard.
For one, PHP did not start out object oriented. Nor did it come with an IDE. Sure, it was dynamically typed (unlike Java). If I recall, it was 1994 too but I can’t be sure.
It was only PHP4 that added an abomination of a class system that motivated the current object system in PHP5. In fact, the problems with PHP have more to do with that pattern: creating abominations that motivate the development of something that isn’t a total abomination (often whilst retaining said abomination for a while).
And, as others have said, small “libraries” is exactly why the todo app needs 13k NPM packages.
I say “libraries” but you can’t call them that. I mean where’s the analogy? A library of one function? Behave
For the most part, the output object/exe size should be the realm of the tooling, not the programmer's concern -- a dependency-walking package-manager, linker or loader -- and in dynamic languages, unused code should never be JITed. Of course, surrounding issues such as choosing bad or incompatible libraries, etc., is another matter.
There’s no way a linker, no matter how smart, can give us back the object size and performance of the ‘90s.
For starters, there’s 64-bits. Pointers were a quarter of the size in the ‘90s.
Then, there is Unicode. All programs need ICU (http://userguide.icu-project.org/icudata). Even if you dynamically link it, many of its symbols (or entry point IDs) end up in your executable.
Unicode isn’t an exception, though. Every library choice you make adds a bit more in size and takes a bit more in performance than the solution from the ‘90s would have.
For example, the moment you decide to use json, you get its entire feature set (arbitrarily nested arrays, a multi-line string parser, ability to read fields in arbitrary order, etc), even if all you need to do is pass two integers and get one back.
A parser generator that generates code for the json subset you need would help here, but would mean extra work for the programmer and the overhead typically isn’t that large, so why bother? It all adds up, though.
Even if you can’t remove some code, you still could optimize memory layout to move code you expect will rarely run into separate code pages so that it likely will never be mapped into memory, but that’s serious work.
And of course there’s all that argument checking/buffer overflow protection people do nowadays that ‘wasn’t necessary’ in the ‘90s.
Sidenote: Niklaus Wirth designed Oberon, one of the coolest operating systems I’ve ever seen. You can run it on an emulator. It’s basically a graphical OS, which sounds like an oxymoron, until you realize that the programming language itself is also graphical.
"Languages like these made programming a lot easier and took many things out of the programmer’s hands. They were object-oriented and came with things as an IDE and garbage collection.
This meant that programmers had fewer things to worry about"
Yeah, right. Those lazy programmers.
It's obviously become easier to build complex software, but software is now required to be much more complex. There are still many things to worry about (actually far more than previously, I'd say), but they're not the same things.
I think a lot of this is governed by Conway's Adage: the software reflects the social systems that built it. If you look at the larger software ecosystem, it reflects the larger society that built it. The priorities and social customs of communities are leading to the "bloat." It's hard to say whether that is a growth on society's part or that software is simply still catching up with society.
Back when a ton of software was written by graduate students... it was small (because no time), fast-ish (because small), and buggy as all heck (because no time).
One only has to look at the demoscene to realise that limitations inspire creativity and efficiency. It's just a form of art, but gives a glimpse at what computers are capable of, if only we would try to use them more efficiently. I think award-winning 4k or 64k demos should be required watching for every software developer. Here are some personal favourites which have also appeared on HN:
> About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage.
That would be in 1970, but my guess is that "ed" would be a hard sell today.
There is plenty of bloat to go around these days and I think we could do a lot more to address that. But we've all got too much skin in the web game to own up to the embarrassing fact that a chat program that's basically IRC with pictures feels like glue on a 2.4 GHz, multi-core CPU.
With that out of the way, we shouldn't get silly, either. Every actually useful feature added will increase complexity and resource usage. I like split-window, code-folding, auto-indented, word-completing, syntax highlighted multiple document editing more than I like saving a few fractions of a percent of my hard drive space.
That text editor quote really bugs me. Sure my Atari 800 had a word processor that came on a 8k cartridge. I couldn't type Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Arabic into. I could only type ASCII. Just the ability to do that alone would likely entail many many megabytes of code.
For one, there is no text based system like those old machines that handles all that so I have to switch to graphics. Just the font alone for all of those languages will be multi-mega bytes and I'll need multi-megabytes more for space to rasterize some portion of those fonts. Rasterising just 4 or 5 glyphs is more work than that entire 8k word processor had to do on its 40x24 text screen.
Then for each language I'll need multi-megabytes for handling the input methods. The input methods are complex and will likely need a windowing system to display their various options and UX so add more code for that.
The point being that we need the complexity. That 8k editor wasn't useful in the same sense as our stuff today. I don't know a good analogy. It's like complaining that people use CNC machines today and at one point got by with a hammer and chisel. I'm not going back.
> more than I like saving a few fractions of a percent of my hard drive space.
Hard disk space is seldom the actual issue. Instead, it's bandwidth used (too expensive to download over a mobile connection, or maybe not even feasible to download over a low-quality connection), or memory requirements (can't reliably use slack + spreadsheet + photoshop at the same time), or power consumption (laptop out of battery in 1 hour).
Do you like split-window, code-folding, etc etc so much that you can't download it while traveling in a rural area, have to close it so you can run Photoshop, and have to carry a spare battery so you can use it for the entirety of a 3-hour plane ride?
That's why Chuck Moore, the creator of Forth, use to say that he can create any software with 99% less code that a commercial version. He always designs software thinking on how to keep it as close as possible to hardware and removing useless abstractions.
Seems to me the software features interact in a kind of network effect, so that the amount of resources required grows faster than amount of functionality.
I do see this as a gap/opportunity in a lot of existing markets. Huge players who dominate these areas are doing so with these giant, slow, unwieldy web apps. Look at how Figma managed to take over in the design market by creating a lighter/faster product than what everyone else was offering. I wholly endorse any other teams that want to use Wasm to kick stagnant old web apps off their thrones.
Surely Figma actually took over that market by 1) making a web-based version of a category of software that was primarily desktop-based, and 2) giving it away for free? I don't think performance has much to do with it.
Modern software is doing orders of magnitude more than the software of the past. The feature set of a word processor in 1980 is a rounding error compared to the 2020 word processor’s print dialog.
The OP’s viewpoint is akin to claiming that aviation has not advanced beyond Kitty Hawk because modern aircraft are simply wasting fuel when they take to the skies. It doesn’t take into account the huge differences in the modern computing environment.
The computers of the recent past weren’t even powerful enough to encrypt a modern TLS session. Does that mean using all that power to encrypt the session today is “bloat”? Of course not. One person’s bloat is another person’s feature. Note that sometimes that feature is that the software can actually exist and be maintained on your preferred platform.
If you think about it, it would be an utterly bleak future if we were just running the exact same software stack on faster and faster hardware. That would represent stagnation, not progress.
I think you'd be surprised how few extra features Word in Office 365 has compared to WordStar 2000 considering the forty year gap. And also how poorly designed, inelegant, and - yes - pointlessly bloated Word feels in comparison.
The biggest differences are screen size - full document vs a few lines of text - and support for colours and outlining. Also, PDFs, which weren't a thing in the early 80s.
But the core features in WS2000 are a lot more than a "rounding error" compared to Word.
The central conceit being we are all doomed as software becomes more bloated and less efficient while processing power remains at it's current levels?
While Moore's law may be over in terms of number of transistors per chip, we are still seeing growth in the number of cores per CPU, not to mention faster memory and the death of spindle storage.
ImO software will start leaning more heavily towards parallelesim (if it hasn't already, building a threaded or asynchronous application is no longer an arcane dark art). Couple that with the surge in adoption of distributed architecture (yes microservices), and the emergence of languages which encourage pragmatism and efficiency (ala Go and Rust) and I think we'll be okay for the next while. Can't speak to electron though (gross).
Incentives are often a big part of the problem. In many cases, people are writing software that will run on someone else's hardware. This applies to basically all front-end web development, all mobile apps, and all software licensed to someone else.
That means the programmer (or their employer) doesn't pay for the electricity it uses (or battery it drains), the RAM it allocates, the disk space it wastes, or the hardware upgrades necessary to make it run acceptably.
Why conserve a resource that you're not paying for? Especially if you have to expend your own resources to do it.
I'm not defending crappy software (nor, apparently, offering a solution), but if a programmer's personal sense of honor is the only weapon in this fight, then it's not a great formula for winning the fight.
There are a lot of these type of articles that conclude that "we", the developers, need to fix this problem. But if you read the original article by Prof. Wirth, it is not up to "us".
It is the reality of the software industry. Time-to-market is the only rule. and it dictates how we write software: Agile, Scrum, don't reinvent, deploy early, fix it later, technical debt.
There are many of us who care about quality of our work. But in performance reviews, the only thing that matters is how many features you shipped. You cannot demonstrate the quality of your work in your performance review. Or better yet, the fact that the software you wrote is going to be bug-free for next 10 years.
>"Niklaus Wirth, the designer of Pascal, wrote an article in 1995:
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.
Niklaus Wirth – A Plea for Lean Software"
[...]
>"Time pressure is probably the foremost reason behind the emergence of bulky software.
Niklaus Wirth – A Plea for Lean Software
And while that was true back in 1995, that is no longer the most important factor. We now have to deal with a much bigger problem: abstraction. Developers never built things from scratch, and that has never been a problem, but now they have also become lazy."
[...]
"The problem does not seem that big, but try to grasp what is happening here. In another tutorial that Nikola wrote, he built a simple todo-list. It works in your browser with HTML and Javascript. How many dependencies did he use? 13,000.
These numbers are insane, but this problem will only keep increasing. As new, very useful libraries keep being built, the number of dependencies per project will keep growing as well.
That means that the problem Niklaus was warning us about in 1995, only gets bigger over time."
It’s true that lots of software is slower than it should be. It’s also true that software does a lot more than it used to. What’s not true is that abstraction is the reason for slow software, at least not on the order of magnitude that the article claims. Even in the worst case, the cost of language level abstractions is well outstripped by advances in processing power.
I’m not actually sure we really even have “slow” software. At least not relative to how much that software can do. Latency is a different story.
Actually it was the year that managers stoppped taking programmers in that know how to do quality control and focus on doing it faster with more bugs so it ships sooner. If you look at some of the MS-DOS programs they rn with little to few bugs, but Windows 95 ran them in MS-DOS mode. Later on Windows programs needed updates and bug fixes to make them work faster and every version of MS-Office fixed bugs but ran slower as CPUs and hard drives got faster they didn't focus on quality any more just shipping it with bugs and fix the bugs later on.
And the trend is not slowing. That said some people like low fat computing.
Another thing.. computing is over. At least in the previous era form. It's not bringing dreams anymore, will probably turn into an ubiquitous invisible form where intrinsic details such as resource usage won't matter.
I think you might be a little pessimistic here - IOT has a wealth of fruit to bear, from:
low power always-on devices with long range radio (LoRa),
few resources (32k ram),
the security constraints of securing every device,
dealing with terabytes of log data in the cloud,
ML at the edge (Kendryte K210),
open-source firmware including radio (DASH7 firmware),
open-source hardware (and open-source FPGA tooling) to create custom hardware designs (hardware implementation of algorithms),
formal verification of OS and protocols,
etc etc.
Even a handful of innovation in any of the above would be groundbreaking.
All that “bloat” enables us to do (much) more with less developer hours.
The balance is the same as ever, developer time vs. compute power. As compute power gets ever cheaper, and developer time still costs the same, we put bigger burdens on the machine to save developer time.
I don't think that developer time is the only metric here.
Yes, every project can get to market or to the next release with a startup company's speed, but you trade-off and generally get "startup quality" that way. That is the actual point.
This industry is so fast-moving that the costs associated with that level of quality is often paid later by other people. There are plenty of examples of this.
He was right in 1995 and he still is. Bucky, as he was called at Standford, is one of founding generation of computer science that is still alive. Being 4 years older than Knuth he might even be the oldest one.
I think this post has some validity to its main points, but I personally think it veers on the edge of "real programmers do X" and reels of rose tilted nostalgia.
Meh, I think this whole argument is wrong. Software "bloat" is fine.
I'm reminded of this [1] article comparing Bruguet and Carson numbers. You have ever cheaper hardware. The marginal utility of any given unit of new, equally serviceable computing power is going to be less than the previous one. So eventually if something can be 2% better/more functionality, etc. at 10x the bloat it is rational to accept that. When you have lots of something you become less efficient in how you use it. If you're surprised by that go and read economics.
It comes with a cost. If not money then environmental footprint. Bitcoin is a good example. Or a toxic deadlands of computer and mobile scrap. Just because companies think it's cheap and blind developers think it's acceptable to bloat.
> 1995 was the year in which programmers stopped thinking about the quality of their programs.
-yawn-
Prove it.
The number of books and articles about the quality of software engineering published in the past 25 years certainly seems to prove we care a great deal about code quality. Probably more than we ever did prior to 1995 when Pascal, BASIC, FORTAN, COBOL, and self-modifying assembly code were being taught in colleges.
As for the point of the article, that hardware doesn't accelerate as fast as programs using it, same challenge: prove it.
This article is all handwaving and speculation with no data to support any of its claims.
Another solution would be to use the proper, statically and strictly typed programming languages with AOT compilation. Rust, Swift, Kotlin - these are the best of production-level languages that can produce both native code and WebAssembly. There are other, similar languages as well. They key point - when compiler knows more about your intentions (e.g. strict and sound type system) it can optimize it better. Especially with LTO or PGO.
I feel like we had this debate a couple months ago. Someone posted that the computer at his local library could search and display data on available books super fast. (I think it was a twitter thread). The interface was programmed in the 90s or something. And then they complained about software today.
My reply was that now days you can, at home, search for a book on a specific interlibrary system, and find what specific libraries have it, download and check out an Ecopy, find out the number due back if you still wanted the hard one - AND have someone go hold it.
It's just not apples and apples anymore. I don't care how fast you can scan a text file in 90s written software.
Considering Wirth was apparently having that debate back in 1995 and even then it was far from a new idea, i doubt we'll solve it any time soon.
Software will just keep getting bloatier and bloatier and hardware more and more powerful to cope with the software inefficiencies (what? you think hitting hardware limits will solve this? nah, we'll just put more cpus in there so that software can be slow in parallel and of course train users to think slow software is normal).
That said it's a bit weird to download a webpage of several megabytes that allows you to input a search that takes seconds to return a result, just to do the equivalent of a text search on a text file that's likely smaller than the webpage itself.
This isn't true for all search engines, but it is true for quite a few of them.
ummonk|5 years ago
It's also hilarious that right after referencing the dependency problem in the JS ecosystem the OP then goes and advocates splitting up your library into a bunch of mini libraries. That's exactly how we got into this mess in the first place.
Also, computer speed has definitely gotten faster. There was a time period during which this was not the case, but particularly the switch to SSDs resulted in a massive jump in computer responsiveness. (The previous jump happened when we no longer needed to wait for dial up to establish a connection)
LeftHandPath|5 years ago
I recently buddied up with someone who has a CS degree to try and make a desktop app, as a side project. I asked if he is familiar with MariaDB and whether or not he's used C++ ODBC.
Our discussion quickly turned into choosing libraries / existing code. He uses Spring and Hibernate and was bewildered by the concept of tying columns to application variables "manually". After I told him I have some CentOS servers where we could put a shared database, he bought a Windows Server because he "needs a GUI". He added, "Ideally, after it's setup, we'll never even have to remote in to it." For the actual desktop application, he wants to use Electron.
It seems there are two distinct branches of computing emerging - one where performance matters, and one where it doesn't. Performance will always matter in places like the stock market or on IBM mainframes. In the consumer-facing world, All that seems to matter is perceived performance. Slack and Discord seem fast, when you watch how quickly a new message pops up on your laptop screen after you sent it on your phone. They seem egregiously slow when you open up task manager and see just how much overhead the chromium-based engine adds -- but most people won't care.
Applications made for "consumers" tend to be made like a cheap car - corners are cut, the end result isn't pretty, but things in the category are what makes up 90% of ordinary use cases. Slack isn't meant to be open on your work machine while you're compiling code in the same way a Prius isn't meant to chauffeur top-level executives. It doesn't mean that the Prius is bad or unimportant - it will do far more for more people than the entire lineup of many luxury car brands.
But I am damn sure that I'd rather be engineering a Bentley than a Prius.
Edit: In the metaphor, luxury and performance are sacrificed, not efficiency. I probably should've used Fiat Chrysler, but unlike Fiat Chrysler, consumer-facing software has its place. I just don't enjoy working on it myself.
badsectoracula|5 years ago
When i first installed Win8 on that laptop i was so impressed i even took a video[0] of it (and yes, it seems like they kept that performance in 8, though sadly by 8.1 it became slower).
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti3LQHXZ0Qg
beervirus|5 years ago
MaysonL|5 years ago
userbinator|5 years ago
The point is that a dependency is a dependency, and making software needlessly complex in any way is bad.
I've run into this a lot with open source stuff (not even JavaScript, just native code): I want to fix/modify something, and I know it's open-source, so it should be easy, right? After looking at the sprawling dependency tree, and the effort it would take to set up a build environment --- which might not even give me the same output as the original binaries, which are working perfectly fine except for the part I want to change --- I decide I'll just find the locations with a debugger and patch the binary directly.
tl;dr: the complaint is equally valid when applied to build tools, which are themselves also software and becoming bloated.
danny_sf45|5 years ago
hinkley|5 years ago
Eventually every problem goes to logn time, best case. The logn factor shows up over and over, from constraints on on-chip cache to communication delays to adding numbers of arbitrary size. We make a lot of problems look like they are O(1) until the moment they don't fit into one machine word, one cache line, one cache, into memory, onto one machine, onto one switch, into one rack, into one room, into one data center, into one zip code, onto one planet.
If we can't solve the problem for all customers, we dodge, pick a smaller more lucrative problem that only works for a subset of our customers, and then pretend like we can solve any problem we want to, we just didn't want to solve that problem.
agumonkey|5 years ago
cryptonector|5 years ago
Funny! Depressing :(
horsawlarway|5 years ago
It's the same freaking fallacy I see again and again on here - It's simple, easy to understand, and dead fucking wrong.
The vast majority of the complexity you're dealing with in modern computing comes from three sources. In the order of impact
1. Networking. It turns out there are real and hard limits on how fast we can pass data around over copper wires. Fiber is better, but you just literally cannot move faster than light, and latency is a big deal when the items you're accessing and changing live somewhere else (and basically everything of value does live somewhere else, or thinks you are "somewhere else").
2. Security. This is a direct consequence of number 1. When everything is connected, everything is connected. You can't just lock the lab door and call it a day now.
3. Compatibility. This is a direct consequence of both 1 and 2. Value is a consequence of compatibility (this is why a good chunk of you on here still support IE, even though you don't want to). We have more devices, of more kinds than ever before. We have more people, with more use cases than ever before. There is value in being as compatible as possible with all those devices and people. All those devices are connected in ways designed to keep them compatible, but also secure. It turns out this is not an easy task.
If you'd like to go wank off over how fast your pre-network, unsecured, unsupported, inaccessible and manually configured systems are, be my guest (oh, and I hope you read english...). The rest of us will continue to produce items of value.
sheepz|5 years ago
I don't see how having IDEs implemented in browsers has anything to do with security, the speed of light or compatibility. It's just the lack of constraints allowed by advances in computer hardware.
Most software is written with no performance considerations in mind at first and the performance issues are addressed only when they become visible. However, if there is abundant memory available, why bother?
Negitivefrags|5 years ago
Usually if there is latency caused by networking in an application it's usually unneeded roundtrips caused by inefficient programmers or inefficient layers in the software stack.
It's insane how much overhead there is.
badsectoracula|5 years ago
Windows being able to run Win32 applications isn't what makes Windows Calc slow nor is anything else you mentioned - you do not need a supercomputer to download currency conversion rates (which, btw, is bloat by itself and could be handled by a dedicated program instead of being shoved into calc) and even the ability to download a CSV or whatever from a remote server via HTTPS (all you'd really need to make such an update) is something the OS can provide to every application and keep secure for everyone (and you know what, this sort of functionality was something Windows provided ever since Win98, but how many people use it vs bundling their own?).
akkartik|5 years ago
A. Backwards compatibility considerations. Early mistakes in the design of an interface are often perpetuated indefinitely. Supporting them takes code. Projects that add many new features also accumulate many missteps. Over time the weight of these past adaptations starts to prevent future adaptation.
B. Churn in personnel. If a project lasts long enough early contributors eventually leave and are replaced by new ones. The new ones have holes in their knowledge of the codebase, all the different facilities provided, the reasons why design decisions were made just so. Peter Naur pointed out back in 1985 (http://akkartik.name/naur.pdf) the odd fact that that no matter how much documentation we write, we can't seem to help newcomers understand our programs without talking to the original authors. In-person interactive conversations tend to be a precious resource; there's only so many of them newcomers can have before they need to start contributing to a project, and there's only so much bandwidth the old hands have to review changes for unnecessary complexity or over-engineering. Personnel churn is a lossy process; every generation of programmers on a project tends to know less about it, and to be less in control of it.
C. Vestigial features. Even after accounting for compatibility considerations, projects past a certain age often have features that can be removed. However, such simplification rarely happens because of the risk of regressions. We forget precisely why we did what we did, and that forces us to choose between reintroducing regressions or continuing to cargo-cult old solutions long after they've become unnecessary.
---
I can't really rebut anything you say. I'm going to keep it on my radar as I go about my project. It's currently pre-network, unsecured and inaccessible. And will always be manually configured, for reasons described in the link. But it's supported, for what that's worth.
IncRnd|5 years ago
1. Networking isn't the number one source of complexity, since local apps can be bloated, slow, buggy, and complex.
2. Security is not a consequence of networking. A non-networked system can be insecure, and a networked system can be secure. Security is more normally viewed in the context of confidentiallity, integrity, and availibility along with the concepts of authentication, authorization, and accountability.
3. Compatibility is not a consequence of either networking or security.
Your comment makes it seem that you believe complexity comes from having to adhere to constraints. That attitude is the issue! Not wanting to adhere to constraints is why software is bloated, complex, full of thousands of components, slow, etc.
mcguire|5 years ago
Security is improved by reducing the number of disparate components.
tedunangst|5 years ago
elihu|5 years ago
I have a theory that this has something to do with incentives: competition can be good for the company that is able to grab another's territory, but on average it's usually a loss. That's especially true from the perspective of shareholders, most of whom don't just hold one stock but many. Some competition is necessary, but too much is inefficient. If you own stock in both Apple and Google, you're happy with them each having their own group of loyal phone buyers. Spending more money than necessary to try to attract the other company's customers to switch is almost a pure loss from the point of view of the shareholder. Companies might not explicitly collude to divide markets (which would be against anti-trust law), but they're still subject to the disapproval of their shareholders if they rock the boat too much. Sometimes I think it makes more sense to think of all publicly-traded companies as being a sort of loosely-structured single corporation rather than truly separate competing entities.
So we have all these different software ecosystems that all these different businesses have built their respective walled gardens around, but software developers suffer because they can't just write to one platform and have their application be portable. Instead, they need a totally different application if they want to be accessible to desktop PC users, Android, iPhone, the web, tablets, servers, enterprise customers, HPC, cloud, game consoles and so on. Sure those users all have different needs, but surely they could have quite a bit more cross-platform consistency and common tools and standards than what we have now.
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
wrs|5 years ago
noobermin|5 years ago
tlarkworthy|5 years ago
rhizome|5 years ago
jesstaa|5 years ago
This isn't it. It's literally what is creating the problem. Small libraries mean duplication, a lack of shared abstractions and dependency hell. The reason garbage collection was such a huge win is that before that every C library shipped with it's own completely different way of managing memory, that's a nightmare.
We need bigger libraries providing better abstractions that are reused through out and written to allow composition and dead code elimination('tree shaking' for the JS crowd) to work well. So you can opt in to functionality you need and opt out of functionality you don't need.
Communities working on big libraries can actually do good release planning, backwards compatibility and timely deprecations. React is a example of a library that does a really good job of this. All the smaller libraries in the JS ecosystem are the cause of the pain in modern JS development.
m463|5 years ago
I found that the standard python library has enormous functionality that makes it possible to solve many problems in a self-contained fashion.
This sort of solution will give you a big toolbox spread out in front of you. You will be less likely to re-invent the wheel. Many eyes on the standard library may lead to optimizations used by everyone.
And it makes it possible to share effectively. You can talk about functions with others using common terms. You can share your code and it will work in other environments. Education can teach in an unambiguous fashion.
markbnj|5 years ago
Oh, please. There are some good points in the article but that hyperbole was unnecessary. I was programming in 1995, and nobody stopped thinking about the quality of their software.
wglb|5 years ago
It is also interesting to note that Knuth also does not do libraries
billfruit|5 years ago
naikrovek|5 years ago
There were people who didn't care about software quality in 1960 and there will be people who do in 2060, so no matter what year he chose, a lot of people would dismiss any chosen year as hyperbole.
As time moves forward, and more "healthy" ecosystems grow up around languages (like unwanted mold or fungus always does) software is going to get slower and slower and slower. And saying that it's a problem will always be an "old man is shouting nonsense again" moment to most young developers.
nl|5 years ago
There's always been good software and bad software.
rossdavidh|5 years ago
People spend time making software less bloated, when it's the number one problem they have. When hardware speed is taking care of making that only the #2 or #3 problem they have, then they will work on whatever the #1 problem is, meanwhile adding more software bloat.
When Moore's Law once and for all stops, due to some law of physics reason, then software bloat will become a priority. Until then, other things are.
cortesoft|5 years ago
It is a form of Induced Demand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
Sebb767|5 years ago
I don't want to say that performance does not matter at all - it does - but with hardware being as cheap as it is and developer time and time-to-market being as expensive, optimizing that last 500ms and 200MB out simply is not going to be worth it.
And let's not disregard the expense of performance optimization - you'll not only need a reference to benchmark and test against, but also spend a lot of time debugging and writing very plattform-specific code with tons of edge cases. It's not like saving 2GB of memory comes for free.
mcguire|5 years ago
Everything seems to have been optimized for the enterprise market.
pacaro|5 years ago
"About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage"
Such a text editor likely couldn't handle lowercase in English, let alone any other Latin script language, let alone cjkv or bi-di. The bloat in software of 95 and the present day is real, but there is no real effort to make an apples to apples comparison in what our expectations of software are, and it massively weakens the argument
Parallel arguments can clearly be made for compilers etc.
userbinator|5 years ago
A lot of these are less than 8K, none of them can't handle lowercase, and I bet the majority of them will be fine with "high CP437" bytes (so other Latin languages.)
joe_the_user|5 years ago
What use would one million, highly functional, stand-alone 8K programs be? What about a hundred thousand 80K programs?
I'd love wholly new categories of software to just pop up. I think about what those might be. But it seems like actually they appear quite seldom. So what else is there to do but throw code at what people use every day, for marginal improvements in existing functionality.
IncRnd|5 years ago
UweSchmidt|5 years ago
I'd join.
Fragmented parts could be suckless.org, old cheap thinkpads from ebay, fast Linux distros, unix command line tools, retrocomputing, raspberry pi; all things with communities and fans who like a certain quality, simplicity and the good old days.
shoozza|5 years ago
https://handmade.network/manifesto
cblconfederate|5 years ago
black_puppydog|5 years ago
mabbo|5 years ago
It turns out, people are perfectly happy to put up with slightly slower software for all of the other benefits we get from modern software: rapid development, rapid deployability, ease of code comprehension, and more.
When users complain about slow software enough to buy a different product (in whatever variation of 'buy' that may be) then it becomes a high priority thing to fix. Software today is precisely as fast as it needs to be- and no more, typically.
To me, this article is just the software engineer's version of Grandpa complaining that things were better in the old days- he's ignoring the reasons why things changed.
Barrin92|5 years ago
I don't think this is true. I think this is more of a 'boiling frog' situation. Increase the temperature one degree at a time and it won't jump out of the pot.
Every individual piece of software slowly eating up more resources is something the user barely notices or doesn't even attribute to the software in question, but give it a few years and everything grinds to a halt, and people very much dislike this, hence the infamous 'Windows rot' that everyone has suffered from at one point of their lives.
realtalk_sp|5 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Gibbon1|5 years ago
jwdunne|5 years ago
For one, PHP did not start out object oriented. Nor did it come with an IDE. Sure, it was dynamically typed (unlike Java). If I recall, it was 1994 too but I can’t be sure.
It was only PHP4 that added an abomination of a class system that motivated the current object system in PHP5. In fact, the problems with PHP have more to do with that pattern: creating abominations that motivate the development of something that isn’t a total abomination (often whilst retaining said abomination for a while).
And, as others have said, small “libraries” is exactly why the todo app needs 13k NPM packages.
I say “libraries” but you can’t call them that. I mean where’s the analogy? A library of one function? Behave
thelazydogsback|5 years ago
Someone|5 years ago
For starters, there’s 64-bits. Pointers were a quarter of the size in the ‘90s.
Then, there is Unicode. All programs need ICU (http://userguide.icu-project.org/icudata). Even if you dynamically link it, many of its symbols (or entry point IDs) end up in your executable.
Unicode isn’t an exception, though. Every library choice you make adds a bit more in size and takes a bit more in performance than the solution from the ‘90s would have.
For example, the moment you decide to use json, you get its entire feature set (arbitrarily nested arrays, a multi-line string parser, ability to read fields in arbitrary order, etc), even if all you need to do is pass two integers and get one back.
A parser generator that generates code for the json subset you need would help here, but would mean extra work for the programmer and the overhead typically isn’t that large, so why bother? It all adds up, though.
Even if you can’t remove some code, you still could optimize memory layout to move code you expect will rarely run into separate code pages so that it likely will never be mapped into memory, but that’s serious work.
And of course there’s all that argument checking/buffer overflow protection people do nowadays that ‘wasn’t necessary’ in the ‘90s.
sillysaurusx|5 years ago
It’s so unknown that it’s shocking. Imagine designing an entire OS that was used by dozens of people, and no one knows about it. http://worrydream.com/refs/Wirth%20-%20Project%20Oberon.pdf
jacknews|5 years ago
This meant that programmers had fewer things to worry about"
Yeah, right. Those lazy programmers.
It's obviously become easier to build complex software, but software is now required to be much more complex. There are still many things to worry about (actually far more than previously, I'd say), but they're not the same things.
wwright|5 years ago
cryptonector|5 years ago
userbinator|5 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11848097
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14409210
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3n3c_8Nn2Y
arexxbifs|5 years ago
That would be in 1970, but my guess is that "ed" would be a hard sell today.
There is plenty of bloat to go around these days and I think we could do a lot more to address that. But we've all got too much skin in the web game to own up to the embarrassing fact that a chat program that's basically IRC with pictures feels like glue on a 2.4 GHz, multi-core CPU.
With that out of the way, we shouldn't get silly, either. Every actually useful feature added will increase complexity and resource usage. I like split-window, code-folding, auto-indented, word-completing, syntax highlighted multiple document editing more than I like saving a few fractions of a percent of my hard drive space.
greggman3|5 years ago
For one, there is no text based system like those old machines that handles all that so I have to switch to graphics. Just the font alone for all of those languages will be multi-mega bytes and I'll need multi-megabytes more for space to rasterize some portion of those fonts. Rasterising just 4 or 5 glyphs is more work than that entire 8k word processor had to do on its 40x24 text screen.
Then for each language I'll need multi-megabytes for handling the input methods. The input methods are complex and will likely need a windowing system to display their various options and UX so add more code for that.
The point being that we need the complexity. That 8k editor wasn't useful in the same sense as our stuff today. I don't know a good analogy. It's like complaining that people use CNC machines today and at one point got by with a hammer and chisel. I'm not going back.
rabidrat|5 years ago
Hard disk space is seldom the actual issue. Instead, it's bandwidth used (too expensive to download over a mobile connection, or maybe not even feasible to download over a low-quality connection), or memory requirements (can't reliably use slack + spreadsheet + photoshop at the same time), or power consumption (laptop out of battery in 1 hour).
Do you like split-window, code-folding, etc etc so much that you can't download it while traveling in a rural area, have to close it so you can run Photoshop, and have to carry a spare battery so you can use it for the entirety of a 3-hour plane ride?
IncRnd|5 years ago
coliveira|5 years ago
rini17|5 years ago
ericmcer|5 years ago
amoe_|5 years ago
hyko|5 years ago
The OP’s viewpoint is akin to claiming that aviation has not advanced beyond Kitty Hawk because modern aircraft are simply wasting fuel when they take to the skies. It doesn’t take into account the huge differences in the modern computing environment.
The computers of the recent past weren’t even powerful enough to encrypt a modern TLS session. Does that mean using all that power to encrypt the session today is “bloat”? Of course not. One person’s bloat is another person’s feature. Note that sometimes that feature is that the software can actually exist and be maintained on your preferred platform.
If you think about it, it would be an utterly bleak future if we were just running the exact same software stack on faster and faster hardware. That would represent stagnation, not progress.
TheOtherHobbes|5 years ago
The biggest differences are screen size - full document vs a few lines of text - and support for colours and outlining. Also, PDFs, which weren't a thing in the early 80s.
But the core features in WS2000 are a lot more than a "rounding error" compared to Word.
jb_gericke|5 years ago
While Moore's law may be over in terms of number of transistors per chip, we are still seeing growth in the number of cores per CPU, not to mention faster memory and the death of spindle storage.
ImO software will start leaning more heavily towards parallelesim (if it hasn't already, building a threaded or asynchronous application is no longer an arcane dark art). Couple that with the surge in adoption of distributed architecture (yes microservices), and the emergence of languages which encourage pragmatism and efficiency (ala Go and Rust) and I think we'll be okay for the next while. Can't speak to electron though (gross).
adrianmonk|5 years ago
That means the programmer (or their employer) doesn't pay for the electricity it uses (or battery it drains), the RAM it allocates, the disk space it wastes, or the hardware upgrades necessary to make it run acceptably.
Why conserve a resource that you're not paying for? Especially if you have to expend your own resources to do it.
I'm not defending crappy software (nor, apparently, offering a solution), but if a programmer's personal sense of honor is the only weapon in this fight, then it's not a great formula for winning the fight.
sally1620|5 years ago
It is the reality of the software industry. Time-to-market is the only rule. and it dictates how we write software: Agile, Scrum, don't reinvent, deploy early, fix it later, technical debt.
There are many of us who care about quality of our work. But in performance reviews, the only thing that matters is how many features you shipped. You cannot demonstrate the quality of your work in your performance review. Or better yet, the fact that the software you wrote is going to be bug-free for next 10 years.
peter_d_sherman|5 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law"
[...]
>"Niklaus Wirth, the designer of Pascal, wrote an article in 1995:
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.
Niklaus Wirth – A Plea for Lean Software"
[...]
>"Time pressure is probably the foremost reason behind the emergence of bulky software.
Niklaus Wirth – A Plea for Lean Software
And while that was true back in 1995, that is no longer the most important factor. We now have to deal with a much bigger problem: abstraction. Developers never built things from scratch, and that has never been a problem, but now they have also become lazy."
[...]
"The problem does not seem that big, but try to grasp what is happening here. In another tutorial that Nikola wrote, he built a simple todo-list. It works in your browser with HTML and Javascript. How many dependencies did he use? 13,000.
These numbers are insane, but this problem will only keep increasing. As new, very useful libraries keep being built, the number of dependencies per project will keep growing as well.
That means that the problem Niklaus was warning us about in 1995, only gets bigger over time."
Related: "The Law Of Leaky Abstractions" by Joel Spolsky: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...
Skunkleton|5 years ago
I’m not actually sure we really even have “slow” software. At least not relative to how much that software can do. Latency is a different story.
usefulcat|5 years ago
There are some valid points in this article, but seriously?
cable2600|5 years ago
agumonkey|5 years ago
Another thing.. computing is over. At least in the previous era form. It's not bringing dreams anymore, will probably turn into an ubiquitous invisible form where intrinsic details such as resource usage won't matter.
alexisread|5 years ago
low power always-on devices with long range radio (LoRa), few resources (32k ram), the security constraints of securing every device, dealing with terabytes of log data in the cloud, ML at the edge (Kendryte K210), open-source firmware including radio (DASH7 firmware), open-source hardware (and open-source FPGA tooling) to create custom hardware designs (hardware implementation of algorithms), formal verification of OS and protocols, etc etc.
Even a handful of innovation in any of the above would be groundbreaking.
mikl|5 years ago
The balance is the same as ever, developer time vs. compute power. As compute power gets ever cheaper, and developer time still costs the same, we put bigger burdens on the machine to save developer time.
In other words, simple economics.
IncRnd|5 years ago
Yes, every project can get to market or to the next release with a startup company's speed, but you trade-off and generally get "startup quality" that way. That is the actual point.
This industry is so fast-moving that the costs associated with that level of quality is often paid later by other people. There are plenty of examples of this.
weinzierl|5 years ago
ausbah|5 years ago
daniel-s|5 years ago
I'm reminded of this [1] article comparing Bruguet and Carson numbers. You have ever cheaper hardware. The marginal utility of any given unit of new, equally serviceable computing power is going to be less than the previous one. So eventually if something can be 2% better/more functionality, etc. at 10x the bloat it is rational to accept that. When you have lots of something you become less efficient in how you use it. If you're surprised by that go and read economics.
[1] https://www.cringely.com/2011/05/19/google-at-carsons-speed/
xvilka|5 years ago
hota_mazi|5 years ago
-yawn-
Prove it.
The number of books and articles about the quality of software engineering published in the past 25 years certainly seems to prove we care a great deal about code quality. Probably more than we ever did prior to 1995 when Pascal, BASIC, FORTAN, COBOL, and self-modifying assembly code were being taught in colleges.
As for the point of the article, that hardware doesn't accelerate as fast as programs using it, same challenge: prove it.
This article is all handwaving and speculation with no data to support any of its claims.
known|5 years ago
xvilka|5 years ago
stevefan1999|5 years ago
coding123|5 years ago
My reply was that now days you can, at home, search for a book on a specific interlibrary system, and find what specific libraries have it, download and check out an Ecopy, find out the number due back if you still wanted the hard one - AND have someone go hold it.
It's just not apples and apples anymore. I don't care how fast you can scan a text file in 90s written software.
noobermin|5 years ago
badsectoracula|5 years ago
Software will just keep getting bloatier and bloatier and hardware more and more powerful to cope with the software inefficiencies (what? you think hitting hardware limits will solve this? nah, we'll just put more cpus in there so that software can be slow in parallel and of course train users to think slow software is normal).
contravariant|5 years ago
This isn't true for all search engines, but it is true for quite a few of them.
mcguire|5 years ago
jimktrains2|5 years ago
jorjordandan|5 years ago
[deleted]
Marazan|5 years ago
Gatekeeping bullshit? The scent is unmistakable.
wldcordeiro|5 years ago
basementcat|5 years ago