wanted to make a post about the perpetual arms race between hardware engineers making their devices as fast as possible and software engineers making their programs as unoptimized as possible, but i couldnt figure out a way to word it
all im gonna say is, theres functionally no reason a phone needs 16 gigs of ram and an insanely fast processor to run youtube. and "tick-tock". and occasionally texting your friends. maybe listen to music now and then. the fact that an iphone 8 is "outdated" and "slow" is stupid. why should an App with words and pictures use 6 gigs of ram. why should my device be able to handle 4k video. i cant even see the pixels anymore at 1080p on a 6 inch screen. cameras in phones are really good now? ok. only because companies stopped investing in producing small digital cameras. game graphics are super impressive on phones now? dont care. we had a tool for that. called a "handheld gaming console". you kids wouldnt understand.
fifty million fucking tonnes of e-waste every year because software vendors insist on writing everything in ffffffucking javascript. fuck you.
About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage. (Modern program editors request 100 times that much!) An operating system had to manage with 8,000 bytes, and a compiler had to fit into 32 Kbytes, whereas their modern descendants require megabytes. Has all this inflated software become any faster? On the contrary. Were it not for a thousand times faster hardware, modern software would be utterly unusable.
— Niklaus Wirth (1995), A plea for lean software
"The major cause of the software crisis is that the machines have become several orders of magnitude more powerful! To put it quite bluntly: as long as there were no machines, programming was no problem at all; when we had a few weak computers, programming became a mild problem, and now we have gigantic computers, programming has become an equally gigantic problem." - Edsger Dijkstra, 1972 Turing Award lecture
I think about this a lot. Software projects have a very strong tendency to become much more difficult and frustrating to work on the longer they persist and the more their scope grows, and as noted by the above posts they also have a strong tendency to become progressively less and less efficient in their use of resources. The fact that most contemporary software projects are deeply interlinked with other complex, long-running software projects only exacerbates this issue.
I go back and forth on whether the root cause is simply that the conditions for creating software under capitalism are fucking terrible, or whether it is something more fundamental to do with the nature of software and/or the ways we create it.
