[rescue] tired of current GUIs / a rant about the daily garbage we put up with

[Phil Stracchino]

On 10/23/19 1:54 PM, Lionel Peterson wrote:
> I lean towards a 'conspiracy of convenience' - yes, programmers are lazy, and
> yes, memory and processors clocks are cheap.
> 
> Programming has, for the most part, evolved from an art to a trade - 'back in
> the day' things like TurboPascal were works of passion and the original 4K and
> 8K Microsoft BASIC interpreters were amazing in what they did (and how they
> did it), while today it literally isn't worth it to optimize your code in many
> applications (allowing for certain notable exceptions). Programmers can easily
> hide sloppy/inelegant code under a mountain of CPU resources.


Look at Minecraft mods.

There's a hell of a lot of mods out there that are slow and laggy and
bog down your server enough to cut your framerate in half.  There was a
mod called ArchitectureCraft on which you basically didn't dare use its
"fancy" balustrades because if you were within twenty blocks of one it
caused enough lighting calculations (already a terribly bad part of
Minecraft's code) to cut the framerate down to 3-4 frames per second.

And then there's the occasional Minecraft dev like KingLemming, who
really sweats the details.  He and the prior ThermalExpansion devs
before him optimized ThermalExpansion code until the per-frame overhead
of the entire mod suite was only three or four milliseconds.  Even under
heavy load.

There's a lot of really sharp people making Minecraft mods.  But there's
a much larger number who are barely phoning it in.  It runs, and that's
good enough for them.  The idea of optimizing their code never even
crosses their minds.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino
  Babylon Communications
  phils at caerllewys.net
  phil at co.ordinate.org
  Landline: +1.603.293.8485
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