[Hacker News Rant] Why Modern Software is Slow

A

Aquarians

I'm tagging my chit chat thread as "Hacker News Rant" since you're one of the few places consisting of people intelligent enough for me to rant on HN crap.

Original article:

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2022/09/29/why-modern-software-is-slow-windows-voice-recorder/

And discussion on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33028300

And why I can't take it anymore?

It's not that I don't know what web junkies do though I do a little.

What I can't take anymore is the smugness of HN crowd stating that modern software is slow because they prioritize customer needs. Lemme quote the typical comment on why Notepad taking 10 seconds to load and lagging behind the user typing a sentence while running on a machine that can easily do galaxy collison simulations actually makes sense: "Any vendor will prioritize requirements, if performance is not in there, that CPU and memory is going to be used if in any way it helps the developers." (Grammatically incorrect retard, even I'm writing English better though's a foreign language for me).

NO THEY WILL NOT PRIORITIZE ANYTHING BUT GETTING AWAY WITH THEIR OWN GROSS INCOMPETENCE.

But there's nothing you can do about it except perhaps, take advantage of their gross incompetence to support your $450k++ salary that barely scratches the surface of a decent living.

Last time stupid Java IDE crashed on me on my 8 Gb RAM machine, I counted 500+ levels in the stack trace. FIVE FUCKING HUNDRED LEVELS OF STACK TRACE for typing a keystroke! Fucking Jeesus. https://blog.codinghorror.com/everything-is-fast-for-small-n/
 
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You can tell this person did not grow up in the 70's and 80's
These young kids are impatient and expect things to move
fast. I can still remember when a beeper was a big deal.

Patience is a virtue and be more grateful that they even have
this wonderful technology.
 
mikeriley said:
You can tell this person did not grow up in the 70's and 80's
These young kids are impatient and expect things to move
fast. I can still remember when a beeper was a big deal.

Patience is a virtue and be more grateful that they even have
this wonderful technology.
More...

Indeed.

 
mikeriley said:
You can tell this person did not grow up in the 70's and 80's
These young kids are impatient and expect things to move
fast. I can still remember when a beeper was a big deal.

Patience is a virtue and be more grateful that they even have
this wonderful technology.
More...

Actually a lot of desktop software was faster to respond back in the day. SW was coded efficiently back then.
 
This is a weird article. Modern software is not slow. I'm running a 2013 Mac Pro and 2014 Mac Book Pro, and video editing, image editing software, and 3D Software (actually any software I am using) are quite snappy on these computers. Eventually I will bump up to M1 processor Macs and these are vastly faster. Or is this a Windows/PC problem?
 
I dunno...I remember seeing the blue screen of death a few times while growing up...been a long time since I have seen a computer just randomly crash and reboot.

Part of the bloat might be caused by more software being developed with higher level languages that run in a virtual machine (Java, C#). These languages are more productive in terms of developer time / cost and safer to use (no memory leaks, less opportunity to do dangerous things with pointers), but tend to have more overhead. I can understand the tradeoff and in most cases, it's probably fine.
 
mikeriley said:
You can tell this person did not grow up in the 70's and 80's
These young kids are impatient and expect things to move
fast. I can still remember when a beeper was a big deal.

Patience is a virtue and be more grateful that they even have
this wonderful technology.
More...

My first computer was one of these:
HC91.JPG


A ZX-Spectrum clone, 40 Kb of RAM, 8-bit CPU at 3.5 MHz, loading and storing programs from a tape recorder (so I'm familiar with how modulation to encode digits sounds).

Even back then I while I was struggling to make my programs as efficient as possible ( the big-O notation ), I remember quarreling with a more fortunate colleague who owned a PC, a much more powerful machine that ran circles around my ZX-Spectrum. He put it bluntly: your effort to optimize is useless, I'm writing the same program in the most haphazard careless, grossly inefficient way and it still runs orders of magnitude faster than your version on the Spectrum. And he was right.

So if a developer nowadays writes their code on a system featuring an Intel Core i9-12900K CPU with 64 Gb of RAM and dual Samsung 980 PRO Solid State Drive in RAID configuration, and only cares enough to make it run "smooth" on their machine, then my or your average and otherwise decent machine is effectively the ZX-Spectrum situation I presented you in comparison.
 
It's a cost issue. You can have more for less if you reduce developer costs. Reducing developer costs is accomplished by using higher and higher level tools. No magic. Nothing to get emotional about. It's just a tradeoff that has been well understood since the 1980s.
 
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