Comment by sorcerer-mar
3 days ago
> I could teach anyone to make faster software in an hour or two,
Is one or two hours of two engineers' time more than zero hours, or no?
> just a little learning up front
Is a little learning more than zero learning, or no?
IMO your argument would hold a lot more weight if people felt like their software (as users) is slow, but many people do not. Save for a few applications, I would prefer they keep their same performance profile and improve their feature set than spend any time doing the reverse. And as you have said multiple times now: it does indeed take time!
If your original position was what it is now, which is "there's low hanging fruit," I wouldn't disagree. But what you said is there's no tradeoff. And of course now you are saying there is a tradeoff... so now we agree! Where any one person should land on that tradeoff is super project-specific, so not sure why you're being so assertive about this blanket statement lol.
Now learning something new for a few hours means we'd have to give up is squishy hard-to-measure things like "feature sets" and "engineering velocity." ?
You made up stuff I didn't say, you won't back up your claims with any sort of evidence, you keep saying things that aren't relevant, what is the point of this?
This thread is john carmack saying the world could get by with cheaper computers if software wasn't so terrible and you are basically trying to argue with zero evidence that software needs to be terrible.
Why can't you give any evidence to back up your original claim? Why can't you show a single program fragment or give a single example?
Okay let's do it this way.
It's obviously true the world could get by with cheaper computers if software was more performant.
So why don't we?
Because people spread and believe misinformation about it being difficult to avoid writing grossly inefficient software.
We know that it isn't difficult because if it was you would have had a single shred of evidence after a dozen comments of me asking for it.