How big of a problem is it that we have this crucial craft, on which we are knowingly staking the future, and almost none of its practitioners understand the fundamental tool they are using?
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Only a tiny minority of professional programmers have a clear picture in their minds of how fast modern computers are. 99.9% have next to no idea. How does this affect software that is even conceived? (Ignoring, for a moment, what is actually built, which we know is very slow).
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(For the record, I don’t place myself in the top tier re understanding of speed or anything else. I am somewhere in the middle of that gradient between the 99.9% and the People Who Really Know.)
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We see all this bad rhetoric claiming “system X is only 2x slower than native code therefore it’s fast”... but one must ignore rationalizations and look at the actual output, which is several orders of magnitude inefficient. Few people are willing to put 2 and 2 together here.
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The most common objection to these points is "we write slow software because it lets us make things faster and more easily". I agree this is the common belief, but it's wrong. If development is so much easier, why is productivity approaching 0 over time?
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Replies seem to be rat-holing on the old well-understood concept that software is slow. Yeah, we know, I have said that many times (and said to ignore that this time). What I am highlighting here is a deeper issue: programmers don't really know what computers are any more.
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Speed is one dimension of understanding that's lacking; the picture of speed in programmers' heads is 2-4 orders of magnitude too slow. It's easy to see and understand this, which is why I brought it up. But it's not the only dimension of missing understanding.
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To make the speed point again, for an attempt at clarity: Programmers have a picture of their computer, in their minds, that they use to figure out what to do. For 99.9%+, that picture is inaccurate: the imagined computer is 100x-1000x slower than the real computer.
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This will result in software that's too slow, obviously. But it also affects what one thinks is possible, what one dares to imagine to do. That is the more important part. Humans are very example-based, and if our examples are wrong, where they lead us will be wrong too.
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I think you’re an incredible programmer and game designer. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed your imaginative and inventive games, especially the
@witnessgame. I follow you for technical ideas and inspiration. But why, oh why, do you feel the need occasionally to belittle people? -
I am not belittling people, I am pointing out an objective issue in an ostensibly scientific discipline. If what I said is untrue, show me how.
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A basic requirement for being a serious engineer is the ability to tell the difference between emotional communication and technical communication, and to compartmentalize them.
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There we go with the dig. I feel many people, including me, could learn a lot more from incredibly clever and accomplished programmers like yourself if the tone were just a little friendlier. I believe tech discourse too often becomes aggressive.
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It's not a dig. If you insist on interpreting things that way, that's on you. Sorry.
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it's bc of time and money, right? the faster our computers become, the less time and skill devs need to finish and release a product. the performance gain of a faster cpu gen is used to make _software development_ faster (and easier), not to make the software itself faster.
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we abstract the hard parts away so development gets easier at the cost of efficiency and reliability. that kinda sucks. but it's also cool that people without a strong computer science background can sit down and write apps.
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This is the common viewpoint, but I disagree with it. For example, development is not easier -- web development, for example, is ridiculously overcomplex and difficult for what it is. And that is the place where the most "tools" exist. Coincidence?
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web development got harder and more complex because we drastically changed our requirements for what the web should be able to do (interactivity, instant server-feedback, etc) with the tools used (html/css/js) slow to catch up.
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for every language, there are now thousands of "black boxes" (call them packages, gems, ..) you can knit together and call it software. that surely must be easier and faster than how we wrote software 10 years ago.
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Why is interactivity supposed to be hard? Computers have been interactive since home computers in the 1980s. About black boxes, if it is surely "easier and faster" then why are we so bad at making software today?
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Question: Do most programmers believe computers are faster than they really are or slower than they really are?
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Most programmers believe computers are way, way slower than they really are, by like 100x or 1000x.
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Most users believe this too, because they've only ever used horrible software.
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