Software disenchantment

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Right on. djf

> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Software disenchantment
> Date: September 28, 2018 at 6:09:30 PM GMT+9
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend Judi Clark.  DLH]
>
> Software disenchantment
> By Nikita Prokopov
> Sep 17 2018
> <http://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/>
>
> I’ve been programming for 15 years now. Recently our industry’s lack of care for efficiency, simplicity, and 
> excellence started really getting to me, to the point of me getting depressed by my own career and the IT in general.
>
> Modern cars work, let’s say for the sake of argument, at 98% of what’s physically possible with the current engine 
> design. Modern buildings use just enough material to fulfill their function and stay safe under the given conditions. 
> All planes converged to the optimal size/form/load and basically look the same.
>
> Only in software, it’s fine if a program runs at 1% or even 0.01% of the possible performance. Everybody just seems 
> to be ok with it. People are often even proud about how much inefficient it is, as in “why should we worry, computers 
> are fast enough”:
>
> @tveastman: I have a Python program I run every day, it takes 1.5 seconds. I spent six hours re-writing it in rust, 
> now it takes 0.06 seconds. That efficiency improvement means I’ll make my time back in 41 years, 24 days :-)
>
> 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.
>
> Everything is unbearably slow
>
> Look around: our portable computers are thousands of times more powerful than the ones that brought man to the moon. 
> Yet every other webpage struggles to maintain a smooth 60fps scroll on the latest top-of-the-line MacBook Pro. I can 
> comfortably play games, watch 4K videos but not scroll web pages? How is it ok?
>
> Google Inbox, a web app written by Google, running in Chrome browser also by Google, takes 13 seconds to open 
> moderately-sized emails:
>
> It also animates empty white boxes instead of showing their content because it’s the only way anything can be 
> animated on a webpage with decent performance. No, decent doesn’t mean 60fps, it’s rather “as fast as this web page 
> could possibly go”. I’m dying to see web community answer when 120Hz displays become mainstream. Shit barely hits 
> 60Hz already.
>
> Windows 10 takes 30 minutes to update. What could it possibly be doing for that long? That much time is enough to 
> fully format my SSD drive, download a fresh build and install it like 5 times in a row.
>
> Modern text editors have higher latency than 42-year-old Emacs. Text editors! What can be simpler? On each keystroke, 
> all you have to do is update tiny rectangular region and modern text editors can’t do that in 16ms. It’s a lot of 
> time. A LOT. A 3D game can fill the whole screen with hundreds of thousands (!!!) of polygons in the same 16ms and 
> also process input, recalculate the world and dynamically load/unload resources. How come?
>
> As a general trend, we’re not getting faster software with more features. We’re getting faster hardware that runs 
> slower software with the same features. Everything works way below the possible speed. Ever wonder why your phone 
> needs 30 to 60 seconds to boot? Why can’t it boot, say, in one second? There are no physical limitations to that. I 
> would love to see that. I would love to see limits reached and explored, utilizing every last bit of performance we 
> can get for something meaningful in a meaningful way.
>
> Everything is HUUUUGE
>
> And then there’s bloat. Web apps could open up to 10× faster if you just simply block all ads. Google begs everyone 
> to stop shooting themselves in their feet with AMP initiative—a technology solution to a problem that doesn’t need 
> any technology, just a little bit of common sense. If you remove bloat, the web becomes crazy fast. How smart do you 
> have to be to understand that?
>
> Android system with no apps takes almost 6 Gb. Just think for a second how obscenely HUGE that number is. What’s in 
> there, HD movies? I guess it’s basically code: kernel, drivers. Some string and resources too, sure, but those can’t 
> be big. So, how many drivers do you need for a phone?
>
> [snip]
>
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