5 ms·
A quote from Henry Petroski that has stuck with me: “The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the stead
by sgloutnikov 3y ago
A quote from Henry Petroski that has stuck with me:
“The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.”
- WJW 3y agoPetroski was completely wrong about this. It is just that all of the gains from hardware have gone to enabling additional features rather than making the same feature set faster. Things like ripgrep make it more than obvious how fast simple software could be on modern hardware, but incentives are what they are and for most of the apps out there more features will be more profitable than more speed.
- jabradoodle 3y agoWhile there is an element of truth to that we have sacrificed performance for ease of development, especially in cross platform use cases. (Often a reasonable trade off, imho)
- andrewstuart 3y agoOh my god ripgrep is fast. I was astounded when I first used ripgrep.
- WJW 3y agoFor sure. The first time I used it I doubted I had used it correctly because I could not believe it had actually grepped through all the ~34k files in my Rails app in under 30 ms.
- ojbyrne 3y agoAlso: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill's_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill's_law
- ignoramous 3y agoI mean, these days I summon a super compute cluster for autocomplete in my IDE and chat with another with a 100k context window to pretty print large JSONs.