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On Disenchantment with the Current State of Software Development

posted by chromas on Wednesday October 03 2018, @09:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-future-is-now,-old-man dept.

canopic jug writes:

Nikita Prokopov has written a blog post detailing disenchantment with current software development. He has been writing software for 15 years and now regards the industry’s growing lack of care for efficiency, simplicity, and excellence as a problem to be solved. He addresses the following points one by one:

  • Everything is unbearably slow
  • Everything is too large
  • Bitrot
  • Half-baked products get shipped
  • The same old problems recur again and again
  • Most code has grown too complex to refactor
  • Business is uninterested in improvement

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by FatPhil on Wednesday October 03 2018, @09:39PM (2 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Wednesday October 03 2018, @09:39PM (#743687) Homepage
    ... were what I was complaining about 15 years ago. His happy memories of efficient well-designed code are to me still relative annoyances.

    I'm (re)writing back-end stuff for a webby thing, which I have deliberately decided to host the dev version of on a 700MHz 32-bit Model B RasPi, so that I do not permit myself any room to be sloppy with implementation, and have decided to write much of the guts in lua rather than Perl - we're talking a 2-4x speedup over the perl versions of the scripts. It's still slowish, but bearable - when it becomes unbearable, I profile it and streamline it. As it's a scripting language (but JIT'ed) the adage of less is more holds true - so there's very little bloat. I've got a RasPi 3 lined up to be the live world-facing machine, that has about 8 times the grunt. No fancies, no bling, just the fricken data requested nothing more - only the lightest CSS to style tables. It's so ugly it's beautiful.
    --
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by suburbanitemediocrity on Thursday October 04 2018, @12:29AM (1 child)

    by suburbanitemediocrity (6844) on Thursday October 04 2018, @12:29AM (#743773)

    I remember back in the 80's it was said Russian programmers were so much better than the west because they had to do the same thing with antiquated hardware.

    • (Score: 2) by DarkMorph on Thursday October 04 2018, @08:51PM

      by DarkMorph (674) on Thursday October 04 2018, @08:51PM (#744314)
      So being a Russian programmer with modern hardware, my code must be fucking awesome!