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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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m curious if you have any sources or stats about this.
Just look at how many engineers a web company has (like Twitter), and look at how much the functionality of the site changes over time. Divide (dfunctionality/dt) by number of engineers to get average productivity.
I think you underestimate the work done at companies like this. My guess is that 75% of projects never get in front of users (because they’re deemed not good enough in some way), and 90% is invisible to users anyway (internal tools, ad delivery/markets, custom work for clients).
You could call these % lacking productivity but I don’t think so. In game dev most stuff isn’t released, it’s tests to see what works before the final version. Would The Witness really take 5 yrs? Not if you already knew what the final product looked like, but to get there? Yes!
So what did the Witness ship after 7 years of development? -A custom, high performance game engine -A rich 3D environment and soundscape, built with guidance from real-world architects -Approx. 500 puzzles that require keen awareness of the environment to solve
What features has Twitter developed in the last 7 years? -Increased character limit for tweets -An objectively worse interface that is hostile to PC users How many employees does Thekla have? Less than 50. How many does Twitter have? More than 3000.
Your Twitter feature list is incomplete tho — what about changes to ads manager (their actual paying customers), API changes, increased reliability, better analytics, etc.
I have no experience with Twitter ads, but I spent $15k on Facebook ads and was astonished at how crappy and buggy the ad system was; it was obvious they put most effort into the regular user-facing page stuff.
This is a compelling argument, but the claim that productivity is approaching 0 needs more sources. I suspect it's far easier to build applications usable by billions of people than at any other time in history. This is likely afforded by some computational inefficiency.
Mostly loved the talk, but I feel that this argument that web companies have X employees but their product doesn't improve doesn't say much about developer productivity. Take PyTorch, for example. A lot of work went into it at Facebook but that is not evident to consumers.
How many things are people working on that don t pan out ? Maybe the productivity of people designing the Twitter web experience is approaching zero. Maybe the twitter managers are incompetent and make the programmers write things that never get used. Lots of confounding vars
the biggest slowdown I see, for productivity and end software, is unnecessary complexity. Systems built on top of systems. More complexity to fix the problems of complexity. No one believes they can write anything from scratch anymore.
the trick is getting to the crossover point. Then I believe one person can compete with large teams. It's harder than you might imagine, but worth it in the long run.pic.twitter.com/gAhZzx35fj
We’re just glueing stuff together, and now there’s more glue than stuff.
I'm not going to lie I'm super confused on what youre talking about.
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