Software Disenchantment (2018)

> Would you buy a car if it eats 100 liters per 100 kilometers? How about 1000 liters? I think the analogy here is backwards. The better question is "how much would you prioritize a car that used only 0.05 liters per 100km over one that used 0.5? What about one that used only 0.005L?". I'd say that at that point, other factors like comfort, performance, base price, etc. become (relatively) much more important. If basic computer operations like loading…

Leaner, cleaner, less buggy, more secure, more performant, longer-lived code is obviously entirely possible. If people managed to do it at the dawn of the information age surely they can do it today, with multiple decades of massive experience, not to mention the incredibly powerful tools developed in the meantime. If its not done its because there is no money in it. In fact the opposite. The counter-incentives to wasting time on high quality software are numerous and affect all…

I get the frustration, but I think this is just the cost of the incredible volume of software that we have. As software engineers we pride ourselves on our systemic thinking, so it's tempting to look at the situation and say "we can and should do better". But it's an illusion to think of software ecosystems as being designed. The reality is individuals, teams and even huge companies are constrained by ecosystems which are too big to really control and…

I think we should come up with a corresponding law of software development 'as computers become more powerful, more of those extra cycles will be wasted'.