30 Oct
2011
30 Oct
'11
7:27 a.m.
On 30/10/11 12:30 AM, Mouse wrote:
Exactly.
--Toby
> [I]t's not because it's "stupid"
(which it isn't), it's because
> developers don't WANT to work on slow machines.
Wouldn't make much difference to me. Because, at least when I do it, my
activities are:
1) A *lot* of thinking
2) A little bit of typing
and
3) Stuff-all else that taxes a machine (the most demanding thing would
be a web browser and occasional unit test runs).
Are there common things that a programmer waits for? Compiles have
hardly been a burden in the past decade... The machine should nearly
always be waiting for the programmer while they think about what they
are doing. ("More thought, less code" is a whole other rant.)
I'd be equally productive on a 10 year old box; but I'd have the benefit
of knowing if I were doing something silly, performance wise. A poorly
phrased database query in a web app will be a problem on the fastest
server, as client load increases. And judging by the bloatware around,
examples surely abound in client side development. How can fast testing
machines not hide performance problems? Performance/resource bugs are
bugs too.
The exception seems to be the arms race in JavaScript engine
performance. If we could set up this kind of competition in many more
areas, we might see software that doesn't demand a 6 month old PC (not
forgetting all those long-standing negative feedback loops that ask you
to throw out perfectly good hardware, buy new kit you don't need, along
with one more trip through the Windows tollbooth).
I sure
don't. Do you?
Other things being equal, I don't.
Other things are never equal. There are four reasons that come to
mind immediately why I'd rather work on my (comparatively) slow SS20
rather than some ridiculously overmuscled "modern" machine.
Specifically, (1) so I can use a good keyboard (I've managed to hack a
peecee X server to take a Sun keyboard on a serial port; it mostly
works but has some annoying issues); (2) I have an aesthetic dislike
for the x86 architecture, and in particular really do not appreciate
wasing a substantial fraction of the silicon (and power) on an
emulation layer that just keeps me away from the full power of the
hardware; (3) working on slow machines keeps me honest, preventing me
from sweeping my coding sins under the rug with hardware oomph; (4) the
SS20 is substantially more reliable hardware.
Obviously, these won't all apply to everyone. Some people, _none_ of
them will apply to. But those are (some of) my reasons.
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