Has Software Development And Philosophy Suffered Over The Years As A Result Of Losing Time-honored Traditions?
January 9th, 2010 | by Frenday |I know it used to be that developers were constantly striving to make things efficient within the constrains of the technology of the day. Is that still true, or are many things now more free-wheeling as a result of technology advancements? Do you feel software quality has suffered as a result?
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2 Responses to “Has Software Development And Philosophy Suffered Over The Years As A Result Of Losing Time-honored Traditions?”
By hawkal2k on Jan 9, 2010 | Reply
YES…
but it has nothing to do with time-honored traditions. It’s all to do with hardware and efficiency.
See back when everything needed to be highly optimised code it was because it was always necessary to put the hardware to it’s’ limits in order to create a product that people would want to buy.
These days with hardware hundreds of thousands of times more powerful than before it is no longer necessary to squeeze out every last cycle with highly optimised code.
In fact most companies would consider it inefficient coding because they are able to do what the customer wants with out optimising their software already because the hardware can cope with the extra demand. It would be considered a waste of time to optimise code.
When I say optimise I mean actually puttting it through benchmark tests and recoding bottlenecks in lower level languages to speed it up not the general clean up as you go optimising.
By mule on Jan 9, 2010 | Reply
The constrains of today are different than they used to be.
The consumer wasn’t an issue back then. Inefficiency wasn’t acceptable. Nowadays, computers are fast enough that inefficiency doesn’t mean impossibility.
Today, the resources that are in demand are developer hours, not memory or cpu cycles. If a program takes too long to make, THAT is inefficient. It’s fine to have a program run slower than it should because most users won’t notice or care.
Now, whether or not that’s ethical is another story: but that is the mindset of most software companies today.