Re: Goodbye Old Friend
Reply #9 –
Actually Bill, I agree with you. With all due respect to Steele's intentions in his statement, while it is true that disk space is cheaper that its ever been, it is also true that programmers are getting less and less interested in tight, efficient code. This in turn results in the kind of reliability and performance problems we see all the time.
Faster CPU's and faster, larger hard drives should result in faster and faster boxes, but the reverse somehow seems to be true. The current crop of programmers seem to just use up all those clock cycles to cope with their sloppy coding and depend on the hardware to make up for the lack of efficiency in their code.
Boot a modern machine with DOS 5 or windows 3.11 and see just how fast these things are - they are so fast you can't see 'em booting. Yet a modern install of windoze, linux or MacOs is as slow as a wet week. Yes, I know they are doing much more than the older OS's, but that is no excuse for poor coding practices or poor architechture. They should be faster and faster - not barely holding their own or even getting slower.
Case in point - windoze vista: XP (which is too slow itself IMHO) is way faster than vista or win7, at least until you have 2 GB installed, then the other 2 catch up. How ridiculous is that - ya gotta have more RAM than whole hard disks used to be (I still own 2 working 5 MB HDD's) just to keep pace with the previous version - but only if you have a processor with twice as many cores and a faster clock.
/rant
Topic: Goodbye Old Friend (Read 8200 times)
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