14 Oct
2011
14 Oct
'11
12:33 p.m.
Dave McGuire wrote:
...which is why I work almost exclusively in the
embedded space now,
when doing software. It's the last refuge for people who care about
(sometimes to an obsessive degree, as in my case) the efficiency of
software.
Yeah, I got out of the full-time software game a decade ago because even
then it was getting hard to find people who cared about efficiency, and
throwing more hardware at problems was the norm. I'm not a perfectionist by
any means, but that just didn't sit right with me.
Having said that, it *was* quite good fun designing large distributed
systems and working out the interactions between them and how best to place
various bits of code, even when those bits of code in themselves might not
be as efficient as they could be. It was still an optimization task, and in
some ways involving some of the same analysis as would be done at a much
lower level.
I'm quite certain that the last few people who
know anything about
code optimization (and I don't mean "putting -O in cc's argument list)
will die in our generation, and the current disturbing trend of horrible
grinding, lumbering, bloated slowness will continue to worsen.
You might be right. I think the thing I hate most is the thought that in a
few decades every computer user will have grown up with computers that
crash often and are bogged down with bloated software. Nobody will really
remember times ever being different, so there'll be no incentive to change
things.
cheers
Jules