Interesting post. Maxed out hardware can't make up for poorly optimized code and architecture.
The computer scientist Niklaus Wirth wrote in his 1995 article "A Plea for Lean Software" that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.
Constraints sometimes can lead to more innovation and efficiency. Limiting the level of hardware that the dev team can design and test against could be a good start.
Constraints sometimes can lead to more innovation and efficiency. Limiting the level of hardware that the dev team can design and test against could be a good start.
As the demoscene has shown, we are still probably on average a few orders of magnitude away from pushing the limits of what even decades-old hardware is able to do.
On the converse, having developers use absolute cutting edge machines with 64GB of ram and gigabit Ethernet connections ensures they will never even understand how much their app sucks.
For one, “screens are changing too fast and I can’t keep up with it” is a common complaint from less tech-inclined people. Screens transitioning from one state to another state, then staying frozen until user completes decision making process, may not be a universally ideal mode on interaction. For me it is but I’m likely not normal.
For another, I’ve just come across an anecdote yesterday that some developers encounter pressures from bad managers to use phones and tablets in place of a desktop OS, or resistance against engineering workstation upgrade plans, with “computers are always slow and that’s normal” as a rationale.
There must be elements that are normalizing slowness on computers, even preferences over fast computers and software. Blaming “bad” programming won’t work if there are incentives against improving it: bad incentives must be identified and removed first.
One job back. manager purposely got a SATA drives for my workstation, claiming they will force me to write faster code. What an idiot decision: 40+ minutes to boot the system, 5-10 minutes to load an IDE... Simply impossible to use. After a while I put in an SSD I got on my own and never told him.
Sounds like a good day to shut your computer down at the end of each shift and then spend the first 40 minutes of each day playing games on your phone [or reading this website].
I think we need to stop saying we'll optimize later and stop shunning people every time they bring up "microoptimizations" on a forum. Let them do it right the first time. No one is coming back to that code to fix it later.
The computer scientist Niklaus Wirth wrote in his 1995 article "A Plea for Lean Software" that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.
Constraints sometimes can lead to more innovation and efficiency. Limiting the level of hardware that the dev team can design and test against could be a good start.