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Fast Software, the Best Software
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Posted by Franz Grieser
Jul 30, 2019 at 03:53 PM
Here is Mark Bernstein’s take on the speed discussion: https://www.markbernstein.org/Jul19/TheNeedForSpeedapartialdis.html
Posted by nathanb
Jul 30, 2019 at 04:15 PM
>Andy Brice wrote:
>As a professional software developer for over 30 years, it shocks me how
>bloated a lot of modern software is. I would be ashamed to write
>bloatware like that. Do these developers know what a profiler is? Maybe
>their bosses don’t care?
>
As an end user, thank you!
It’s really frustrating to remember using software 15 years ago that was more responsive than today, knowing the hardware is infinitely faster. Now most ‘apps’ are slow to load and pause often…I assume they are phoning home to the mother ship for ads, tracking, software updates, syncing, whatever.
There seems to be a Moore’s law about software bloat that cancels out Moore’s law for CPU power. My Dad always told me that no matter how big of a tackle box you get, that your existing collection of fishing stuff WILL fill it up. Our wardrobe increases with our closet sizes, and our general stuff increases with home size as the ratio of how much of it is useful day-to-day decreases. Speed and storage increases are just more rooms in a house for software engineers to stash more crap that is only tangentially related to the core purpose of the software.
I will never forget my first smartphone, a Palm Treo 650. As an ‘extended brain’ where I want to QUICKLY jot a note, appointment, todo, grocery item etc….I’ve never used something faster or more reliable. Of course I wouldn’t trade my Android for it today, but I do miss that snappiness several times a day.
Posted by Paul Korm
Jul 30, 2019 at 05:42 PM
I read the Craig Mod piece, and a lot of blogosphere and commentariat responses, and came away thinking “yes, but…”. Mod focuses his ire at a bundle of software that are completely unrelated in intent and audience. Mod’s article seems written more to get ghits and page views than to offer a constructive assessment of the state of the art.
Sure, no one likes unpleasant and confusing software. (Without naming names, some of the developers who come onto this forum to flog their work have some pretty unintuitive stuff on offer.) But before trying, or buying, software it’s a good idea to have a clue about what it does and why someone would want to own it.
In recent been lucky to have the gelt to buy hardware above the median point of processing power, and sometimes more. With that, “speed” (which I suppose means responsiveness more than anything) has never been an issue. I buy a lot of software, because I like to CRIMP and I like independent developers, since I work in related fields. Maybe 10% of the time I delete something because it doesn’t cut it—but not because of speed. Usually because the developer seems to have misunderstood what someone in my line of work needs.
Posted by Luhmann
Jul 31, 2019 at 05:07 AM
I still fondly remember how fast MORE felt when it first came out.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Jul 31, 2019 at 08:48 AM
Mark Bernstein’s interesting take on speed also links to an interesting discussion of Twine, the open-source hypertext authoring tool.
http://chrisklimas.com/twine-past-present-future/
Twine 2.0 itself can be found here: http://twinery.org (I have to say, this is one of the neatest website ideas I’ve seen for a long time).
Cheers,
Bill