alt Hacker NewsFeel like this is the equivalent of a traffic engineer standing at the grand opening of the 5th lane for the highway saying there’s no reason for traffic to be slow anymore.
That is, there’s a misunderstanding of why software (traffic) was slow in the first place, and it has nothing to do with our ability to generate code (number of lanes), even if that code is “high quality”.
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I agree with traffic example, however, I don’t think it quite applies to software in the same way. Imagine a world where for some reason our current quality of hardware is locked in place; they can never get better or faster in any way shape or form. Then the big tech race will be optimizing software. I personally think that there would be a 10x to even 100x increase in software speed that is possible through many optimizations. The current software incentive is geared more towards adding more features rather than optimizing performance since software engineers know they can always know hardware will keep getting better which will keep their slower, less optimize software at similar speeds. This isn’t a critique of software engineers, simply a statement of the incentives under which they operate.
The author clearly understood this part of the topic and agrees. There are multiple reasons that software is slow.
As you imply, some of them are not because spending time on optimization seems relatively expensive compared to value. But some of them are.
I get the paradox for adding a few lanes…
Imagine traffic not getting any better after adding 1000 lanes in a medium sized town… not just to one area but to every single damn road.
Yet we’ve done this with RAM, CPU, and storage…
The HN crowd understands that, depending on bottleneck, adding a fifth network connection (lane) between 2 nodes may not necessary decrease the latency (travel time).
you dont mesaure the quality of a plane by how much it weighs. but yea i think everything is rot to the core. app to os if just wackness that nobody cared about.
Still a struggle to get coworkers to write docs or tests despite it being effortless.
At the end of the day its a mindset.
What's the public transport of software development? Where can I get good train service here?
just¹ prompt like the lotus philosophy:
Simplify, then add lightness.
[1] hn favorite word
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Sorry I can't resist the pedantry but a traffic engineer knows better than anyone that adding a 5th lane (often even a 4th) won't improve traffic except in fairly specific circumstances. :D