this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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In the same way that more slop is good for the hog trough
Human development is the development of labor saving practices (i.e development tools and methods) that liberate humans and labor to do other things. In this case "good software" is bound to that it 's efficient enough to run on the system and do it's job and not slow down the whole system unjustifiably. Why on earth would anybody go full performance optimization autism mode, spending hours grinding down fractions of efficiency out of code, when one couldn't even notice the difference between it and less optimized code running on the target system? One could spend all that time to do something actually productive for the project like a new feature or do something entirely else. Those earlier game and software devs would have killed for hardware that didn't require everything to be custom built and optimized to a T. Not having to optimize everything to to a max doesn't produce "slop", it produces efficiency.
I agree with most of what you said, but the problem is not everyone has brand new hardware. And it sucks that people have to buy new computers just because software devs are lazy and their program uses 10x more memory than it should.
I think the end of Moore's law will push more software efficiency since the devs won't be able to count on free hardware gains. As compilers and other dev tools get better, i think the optimizations will become more automated.