5 ms·

I could edit a doc with a word processor that could fit onto a floppy, and it worked well. Now, why does the same task require a multi GB pos bloatfest to do th

I could edit a doc with a word processor that could fit onto a floppy, and it worked well. Now, why does the same task require a multi GB pos bloatfest to do the same job? And oftentimes, more slowly! Imagine for a second, the power of today's hardware running optimised lean code. It could be so good, but we accept bloated crappy bug ridden shitfests of OS and application software. We seem to care more about glossy and social then performance. It is a real problem.

FollowSteph3 11y ago
The problem is you can't write that optimized lean assembly code in a lifetime anymore. Software today does a lot more than it used to under the seams now that most people forget about.
- bloateddevtards 11y ago
  I am not sure we need to go as lean as hand-rolled asm, but we sure went down a wrong path when we just accept that word will get bigger and bigger with each release. No one asks why.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    I think so too. It's not about ASM snippets; it's about people not knowing what their software actually does. Software bloat isn't magic, nor is it static; your CPU is doing something. If with time application gets bigger and slower, and yet no extra features appear to explain it, it means your CPU is running code that shouldn't be run, wasting its cycles on pointless and irrelevant computations. That's laziness and/or stupidity.
    - wongarsu 11y ago
      >That's laziness and/or stupidity Or the failure of a large team to properly manage software complexity.
      - prof_hobart 11y ago
        Or higher priority things to work on. Optimisation doesn't come for free.
    - prof_hobart 11y ago
      It's not laziness or stupidity (well, it might be sometimes, but certainly not always). It's using your time to do something else, such as improving security, or adding a new feature. Some people seem to be talking as if it automatically takes the same amount of time to create efficient code as inefficient code, and the idiot developer has simply forgotten to add the -run_faster option on the compiler. I'm involved in a project at the moment where a team of developers and engineers have spent much of the last month trying to get response times in some very specific circumstances in an application down to an acceptable level. That's not because they are either stupid or lazy. It's because these things are hard - there's an awful lot of moving parts, and an awful lot of things that can go wrong in each of them. When they get it down to an acceptable level, they'll ship it to the users. It won't be blazingly fast, but it'll be good enough. They could definitely spend longer tuning it further and getting it going even faster. But every day they do that will be a day longer until the features that the users want are actually available to them.
      - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
        Perhaps too many moving parts. Engineers are criticized for 'reinventing the wheel' and writing code when open source is available. But use too much open source, and you have too many moving parts, you don't know how they work, and things like locks and latency are uncontrollable. A familiar storey!
        prof_hobart 11y ago
        Apart from the OS (which isn't where the problem lies), there's no open source in it. The reason there's lots of moving parts is because modern computers, OSs, languages, application servers, libraries, databases etc are built to do a lot of very complicated things. We could have written the entire application from scratch, not using any 3rd party elements so that we had full control over every element. But that would have taken several orders of magnitude longer to deliver actual useful working software to the users.
        JoeAltmaier 11y ago
goldfire 11y ago
If I want to start Microsoft Word right now, here's what I have to do: I press the Windows key, type "word", press enter, and then wait for it to start. That entire process takes three seconds; I just timed it. Now that Word's been run once already, I can start it again in less than one second. That compares pretty favorably with the process of finding a floppy disk, inserting it, and then finally running a command on it (it's even worse if I don't remember the cryptic command name, because then I have to wait for the floppy's directory to be read). To say nothing of how much easier to deal with this "bloatfest" will be once I get it loaded, compared to your leaner alternative.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  That's probably because you have SSD, but anyway; I could do the exact same process 10 years ago (with "winword" instead of "word"), get similar response times, and yet the software was an order of magnitude smaller and more responsive. And it's not like Word gained many actually useful features during that time.
  - nlawalker 11y ago
    >> And it's not like Word gained many actually useful features during that time. Then use the 10 year old version! Unless, of course, one of those few "actually useful features" is something you can't live without. A lot of people use Word for a lot of use cases. The value of an added feature that someone needs always trumps the performance cost of adding it until the performance becomes so bad that it becomes the reason that other people stop using it.
    - XorNot 11y ago
      People who complain about bloat are usually complaining about features they don't use. Of course watch what happens when people start doing metrics and optimizing their UI for "common uses" - turns out you're optimizing for non-existent users (see: the Ribbon).
      - 11y ago
prof_hobart 11y ago
How often do you need to edit a doc using a word processor that's running on a floppy? I'm guessing that it's not very often. If you really need a lightweight word processor, there's plenty out there. They just probably won't have a lot of the features that the big hitters have now. And if you really want a lightweight OS, there's a fair few Linux distros aimed at that market. What do you want your code to optimised for? Fast startup times? Functionality? Extensibility? Stability? Compatibility? Security? None of those things come magically for free, and every day that a developer spends on one is a day that they aren't spending on another. And if they are waiting until any, or all, of those are optimised for any possible scenario, you'll be waiting a long time for any software at all. As Blaise Pascal (or possibly one of many other possible candidates) once said - "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." The challenge of optimisation v delivery is not a new one.
- garthk 11y ago
  Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte. – Blaise Pascal, Lettres Provinciales, 1657
tomjen3 11y ago
Because it is _not_ the same program. For one the spell checker is much better, for another it has added a grammar checker, for a third it now has change tracking and comments and lots of other goodies. Don't complain that you don't need those features: it is on you to choose the right tool for the right job. If all you need is a light spell check and text editing, notepad++, vim or Emacs will do nicely. Plenty of people need the more advanced features.

FollowSteph3 11y ago

The problem is you can't write that optimized lean assembly code in a lifetime anymore. Software today does a lot more than it used to under the seams now that most people forget about.

bloateddevtards 11y ago
I am not sure we need to go as lean as hand-rolled asm, but we sure went down a wrong path when we just accept that word will get bigger and bigger with each release. No one asks why.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I think so too. It's not about ASM snippets; it's about people not knowing what their software actually does. Software bloat isn't magic, nor is it static; your CPU is doing something. If with time application gets bigger and slower, and yet no extra features appear to explain it, it means your CPU is running code that shouldn't be run, wasting its cycles on pointless and irrelevant computations. That's laziness and/or stupidity.
  - wongarsu 11y ago
    >That's laziness and/or stupidity Or the failure of a large team to properly manage software complexity.
    - prof_hobart 11y ago
      Or higher priority things to work on. Optimisation doesn't come for free.
  - prof_hobart 11y ago
    It's not laziness or stupidity (well, it might be sometimes, but certainly not always). It's using your time to do something else, such as improving security, or adding a new feature. Some people seem to be talking as if it automatically takes the same amount of time to create efficient code as inefficient code, and the idiot developer has simply forgotten to add the -run_faster option on the compiler. I'm involved in a project at the moment where a team of developers and engineers have spent much of the last month trying to get response times in some very specific circumstances in an application down to an acceptable level. That's not because they are either stupid or lazy. It's because these things are hard - there's an awful lot of moving parts, and an awful lot of things that can go wrong in each of them. When they get it down to an acceptable level, they'll ship it to the users. It won't be blazingly fast, but it'll be good enough. They could definitely spend longer tuning it further and getting it going even faster. But every day they do that will be a day longer until the features that the users want are actually available to them.
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Perhaps too many moving parts. Engineers are criticized for 'reinventing the wheel' and writing code when open source is available. But use too much open source, and you have too many moving parts, you don't know how they work, and things like locks and latency are uncontrollable. A familiar storey!
      - prof_hobart 11y ago
        Apart from the OS (which isn't where the problem lies), there's no open source in it. The reason there's lots of moving parts is because modern computers, OSs, languages, application servers, libraries, databases etc are built to do a lot of very complicated things. We could have written the entire application from scratch, not using any 3rd party elements so that we had full control over every element. But that would have taken several orders of magnitude longer to deliver actual useful working software to the users.
        JoeAltmaier 11y ago

goldfire 11y ago

If I want to start Microsoft Word right now, here's what I have to do: I press the Windows key, type "word", press enter, and then wait for it to start. That entire process takes three seconds; I just timed it. Now that Word's been run once already, I can start it again in less than one second. That compares pretty favorably with the process of finding a floppy disk, inserting it, and then finally running a command on it (it's even worse if I don't remember the cryptic command name, because then I have to wait for the floppy's directory to be read). To say nothing of how much easier to deal with this "bloatfest" will be once I get it loaded, compared to your leaner alternative.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
That's probably because you have SSD, but anyway; I could do the exact same process 10 years ago (with "winword" instead of "word"), get similar response times, and yet the software was an order of magnitude smaller and more responsive. And it's not like Word gained many actually useful features during that time.
- nlawalker 11y ago
  >> And it's not like Word gained many actually useful features during that time. Then use the 10 year old version! Unless, of course, one of those few "actually useful features" is something you can't live without. A lot of people use Word for a lot of use cases. The value of an added feature that someone needs always trumps the performance cost of adding it until the performance becomes so bad that it becomes the reason that other people stop using it.
  - XorNot 11y ago
    People who complain about bloat are usually complaining about features they don't use. Of course watch what happens when people start doing metrics and optimizing their UI for "common uses" - turns out you're optimizing for non-existent users (see: the Ribbon).
    - 11y ago

prof_hobart 11y ago

How often do you need to edit a doc using a word processor that's running on a floppy? I'm guessing that it's not very often. If you really need a lightweight word processor, there's plenty out there. They just probably won't have a lot of the features that the big hitters have now. And if you really want a lightweight OS, there's a fair few Linux distros aimed at that market. What do you want your code to optimised for? Fast startup times? Functionality? Extensibility? Stability? Compatibility? Security? None of those things come magically for free, and every day that a developer spends on one is a day that they aren't spending on another. And if they are waiting until any, or all, of those are optimised for any possible scenario, you'll be waiting a long time for any software at all. As Blaise Pascal (or possibly one of many other possible candidates) once said - "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." The challenge of optimisation v delivery is not a new one.

garthk 11y ago
Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte. – Blaise Pascal, Lettres Provinciales, 1657

tomjen3 11y ago

Because it is _not_ the same program. For one the spell checker is much better, for another it has added a grammar checker, for a third it now has change tracking and comments and lots of other goodies. Don't complain that you don't need those features: it is on you to choose the right tool for the right job. If all you need is a light spell check and text editing, notepad++, vim or Emacs will do nicely. Plenty of people need the more advanced features.