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Question: Do most programmers believe computers are faster than they really are or slower than they really are?
Most programmers believe computers are way, way slower than they really are, by like 100x or 1000x.
Most users believe this too, because they've only ever used horrible software.
I remember reading a thread where someone was confused if you are just supposed to "check the achievement conditions every frame, wouldn't that be slow?"
Yet here we are, using quad core processors and several GB of RAM on our phones to mostly run apps that do computationally trivial stuff.
For me, this came from university classes taught by older professors. They knew their stuff, but were forged in the fire of the late 80's personal computing.
There are a couple of key takeaways. 1) Most software should be a lot faster than it is, but isn't due to inefficiency, but also 2) Most software is over-optimized unnecessarily, because computers are so fast it doesn't matter. /1
Having come from the games industry, my heuristic for needs-intense-optimization: A system that processes thousands of entities and needs to run in a (small) fraction of a 16ms frame. I see so many instances of micro-optimizing code that get called less than once a second /2
I know I'm guilty of falling into that thinking.
I feel I'm failing to grasp your point. Is it that somehow developers underestimating processing speed leads them to write slower software? Or that it reduces their ambition for the type of software they think they can produce? I want to understand
Why do they believe this? Not keeping up with hardware advances? Lack of understanding of how computer hardware functions? Something else?
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