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

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

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Thursday October 04 2018, @05:40PM

    by jmorris (4844) on Thursday October 04 2018, @05:40PM (#744205)

    The problem is not realizing when programmers are more expensive than throwing hardware at a problem and when they aren't. The example in the article was a bad one. A script a single person runs daily and gets a correct answer from in a second or two is not a candidate for any further optimization. If it is a resident process on a billion battery powered devices it is. Between those poles the reward for optimization varies.

    My Fedora desktop is currently wasting 51MB of resident set for a goddamned bluetooth applet written in Python and $deity only knows how many libraries so it can sit idly doing nothing useful. It also need another 42MB for the program that manages the tray icon, it, keeps bluetooth/obex in memory for another 7MB, talks to bluetoothd which squats on another 5MB and interacts with Pulseaudiod and pulse/gconf-helper for another ~22MB. There is no sound currently being produced btw. Over 100MB are currently mapped just for the bluetooth stack. Considering how many Linux desktops there are, all of that is a very good candidate for an optimization project but nobody will do it because they know that before they could complete the work the underlying libraries will change again, the Mad Hatters will reinvent the whole middle layer of plumbing again or perhaps rip and replace the entire desktop. Now consider that Android re-uses some of those bluetooth libs.

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