14 Oct
2011
14 Oct
'11
1:29 p.m.
On 10/14/2011 03:33 PM, Jules Richardson wrote:
Same here. Except that I *am* a perfectionist. :-/
That's happening *now*, at least with the crashing. Many people I've
talked to from the Windows world (no offense to Josh, who may be one of
Microsoft's only competent developers) honestly think that's "just how
computers are". :-(
Guest pointing at big server with 16 hard drives: "Man, I'd hate to
have to reinstall THAT!"
Me: "Reinstall? Why would I ever need to?"
Guest: "Every computer needs to be reinstalled once in a while!"
Me: [head explodes]
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
New Kensington, PA
...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.
Oh yes, fun stuff indeed! I love challenges like that.
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.