3
exelix
6y

I'd like to share this article i found on reddit with you :
http://tonsky.me/blog/...
It's about bloated sowftware and performances on modern hardware, I mostly agree with it. What are your thoughts ?

Comments
  • 1
    Yes, I agree with the article in general. However, in his post he described the cause, but (in my eyes) did not bring a valid counterargument.

    Quote:

    "You’ve probably heard this mantra: “programmer time is more expensive than computer time”. What it means basically is that we’re wasting computers at an unprecedented scale. Would you buy a car if it eats 100 liters per 100 kilometers? How about 1000 liters? With computers, we do that all the time."

    Because programmer time is more expensive than hardware/computer time, we waste it. We do not waste 100 liters of gasoline per 100 km, because it is not cheap. Nobody would buy the car because they would have to spend a huge amount of money. For software (as he already stated) this is not the case. If gasoline would be worth nothing, of course everybody would buy the cheap car with a high consumption.
  • 0
    @monkeypatch
    But on the other hand more performant hardware is more expensive and consumes more electricity to run. Around 6 or 7 years ago i had an LG android phone with a 600mhz cpu, a charge lasted up to 5 days (granted that i don't use the phone a lot). Today i have a Xiaomi with a 8core 2 Ghz cpu but the battery struggles to get to 3 days, but still i do the same things i did before: WhatsApp and a bit of web browsing. I know there are many things behind the scene, but seeing this as an end user, is it an improvement ? Did really LG,google, WhatsApp etc do their best to make the os and the apps efficient ?
    If I wanted to use that phone today i couldn't because the google play services wouldn't fit in its internal memory (the reason i had to get rid of it)

    The article doesn't give a techincal answer to the problem but encourages developers to do things in an efficient way, giving a few examples of software made with performance and good design in mind

    Edit: Ninj'd
  • 1
    And here comes the irony: the page weighs a hefty 3.4 MB, a whopping 44 requests, scales down images in HTML/CSS, doesn't leverage browser caching, is built with Ruby as framework and pulls in Google fonts. All of that to make a point about lazy programmers who produce bloated crap. LOL!
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