second day of work over. i migrated from dev to devops. it's refreshing. even inspires me a little. motivates me. it does reinforce my view on software dev though. no one cares about speed, memory, minimalism and dependencies anymore. it's all thrown together, happy it compiles
3 years ago 路 馃憤 marginalia, calgacus, hyperlinkyourheart
I'd like to care about that stuff, but unfortunately all I have time to do is throw something together and move on to the next thing :( 路 3 years ago
Well we've had software with constantly changing state for 30 years as well. Virtually the entire video game industry is like that. And they've gotten less responsive as well. A 60 FPS game today is a lot more sluggish than a 60 FPS game from 1995, because the rendering pipeline is so damn complicated it can take 100ms to get it onto screen (and modern screens can incur a 50ms delay as well). 路 3 years ago
when I look at programs like kubernetes and etcd and haproxy and such, there are many things that are wicked fast. it's just none are consumer programs. or business programs, because those are even worse than consumer stuff 路 3 years ago
@marginalia what i mean by reloads and updates isn't screen refreshing. it's that modern apps don't have a sleep state anymore. a browser should go into sleep state after a page has been rendered. same for phone apps. very few do, they poll and push and refresh and shit, not to mention that most of the time half of the app is sideloaded after booting it 路 3 years ago
(I also think KDE is an interesting case in the discussion, since it actually *is* and has pretty much always been extremely fast; UI widgets react so fast that they've added a bunch of animations to slow it down a bit, otherwise they feel weird and flimsy) 路 3 years ago
@defunct I'll argue what makes software slow today is that it's working through 30 layers of abstraction, no amount of compiler magic can quite rescue you from that. Putting stuff on screen is and has always been fast. Putting it in a web browser window isn't, and will probably never be fast (also in part because the rules for rendering websites are extremely bloated). 路 3 years ago
@marginalia many look prettier, resolutions are crisper and monitors are bigger. there's that. what makes these applications less fast, imho, is the constant need to refresh. everyone expects an app to immediately show an update when it's being made you know? 路 3 years ago
It does rather seem like software grows to use the available resources. It amuses me that computers have gotten hundreds, if not thousands of times more powerful the last 30 years, yet applications still run at the same speed and often don't have many more features than their Windows 3.11 counterparts (from a user perspective). 路 3 years ago