Hacker News Reader

Comment by VMG | Hacker News Reader

> The pyramid is also an artifact of the era in which it was created.

> Computers were slower, testing and debugging tools were rudimentary, and developer infrastructure was bloated, cumbersome, and inefficient."

What AMD giveth, Electron taketh away.

No matter how fast computers get, developers will figure out a way to use that extra compute to make the build and the test cycle slower again.

Of course it is all relative - it is hard to define what a "unit" test is when you are building on top of enormous abstractions to begin with.

No matter what you call the test, it should be fast. I feel productive when I can iterate on a piece of code with 2 second feedback time.

View on HN

> What AMD giveth, Electron taketh away.

This is actually true but the moralistic negative tone and no explanation about it makes me think the writer did not understand why this is happening and why it has both PROs and CONs. It's similar to some other statements I heard before on this subject "It's pointless to add/increase roads, there will always be traffic". It's true there will always be traffic but it's not pointless. There will always be traffic because moving more cars becomes faster so more people do it. You should consider though that traffic on a single lane helped 100 people while traffic on a 2 lanes street helped many more people. The same is true for software development. Computers get faster, but programs tend to stay around the same amount of perceived speed. Like roads increase and yet there is still the same amount of traffic. When computers get faster it means that developers can write code faster and so they can write more code and/or cheaper code. Writing programs becomes also cheaper so developer need to be less expert and trained. The computer that brought astronauts to the moon was probably less powerful than today's smart thermostat. Yet to land on the moon with that computer required a team of people that were likely at phd level, intensely focus and dedicated and they were all socially and culturally adjacent to the inventor of the computer. By comparison, today's programs do trivial things using immense resources. And yet because many more developers can code, there are also immensely more programs about millions of use cases that are developed all over the world, by people that do not even speak English in some cases.

So programs did become less efficient because the true bottleneck was not the efficiency of the program. The true bottleneck was developer hours and skills.

This doesn't mean that it's okay for all programs to be slow or that you should be satisfied in using programs that you perceive as slow. The correlation between speed/efficiency of a program and its UX it's a Bell curve. At the beginning the faster it gets the better the UX. After a certain speed though the UX improves marginally. If the final user cannot distinguish between the speed of two different programs it means the bottleneck is not anymore about speed and another characteristic becomes the bottleneck. This said, there will always be work for efficiency engineers or low level developers to write more performant code. But not all code will require to be written as efficiently as possible.

I didn't intend it as a negative tone. It is meant as an observation: while the raw system speed has increased orders of magnitudes, certain high-level operations seem to remain constant speed over time.

The time it takes to booting an operating system, start a program, compile a program or run a test suite seems to remain somewhat constant over my career.

It indicates that the determining factor is not the clock speed of the underlying system but instead the pain tolerance of the users or developers.

Thank you for answering and explaining @VMG! Yes exactly, some features of software will naturally gravitate to some values where they are good enough and something else becomes the bottleneck and determining factors. I still believe though there will be a niche space for people that need the extra performance because their use case takes an advantage from it.

Software has gotten so slow we've forgotten how fast computers are

Also, hardware is rapidly approaching saturation point of the Moore's law. Software will have to adapt.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com