True, passionate developers are a niche. Most (web) developers are just doing their job from 9 to 5, and for most jobs glueing together projects from premade frameworks resulting in utter garbage with megabytes of overhead is perfectly acceptable because angular/react+everything-nuget-dependecies-depend-on “works on Chrome” and “that’s all our customers care about”.
It’s a frustrating reality that 95% percent of the developers don’t care about their job enough to deliver good code. The reason that “it works on chrome” is acceptable is because of the market share.
Maybe they are passionate about the functionalities of their product, and not the fact that their website fits in just a few kilobytes. That’s fine too, and it’s great for them if they manage to make the website work.
And the situation is not necessarily any different in other fields of software development. People just hopefully find a place to work which is in line with what they want to do. Indeed in my case I like writing small, simple, and fast code, so I do embedded Linux things with realtime constraints for my paid job. But not everyone would find that enjoyable, spending weeks to finetune a single function to get it running at the required speed.
You are right, of course. If people are happy with their jobs and the pay, good for them.
I work on embedded software where limiting system resources is very important. When I try to expand my team, most people who call themselves experienced programmers are actually just people who have learned a couple of tricks.
It does get frustrating, when I get called out by these people for being old fashioned for writing good functional code without relying on all sorts of second hand frameworks.
Back to websites… making websites that only work on Chrome is really bad practice and not something to be proud of.
These times are strange times, a lot of new generation kids enter “the arena”, these are used to infinite computing resources, all this convenience makes them lazy and used to not using their heads in the best way so they don’t optimize resource management, they don’t even think about it, on the contrary they have a tendency to have more to deal with. It almost seems that the more space and resources available, the more technological bulimia of resources increases. There is something wrong collectively and psychologically and perhaps not only in the world of technology … “A big ball of lard is eating this world.” (a The Beach film quote).
Paradoxically, the 80s and 90s computing was beautiful for this, we had little space, few resources, and we had to use our head at best so we could to be able to give our best with these few resources, this also became a training of the minds.
And in fact, pay attention to it, in that period, a lot of competitions emerged and those who gave their best, and these competitions were understood and appreciated.
Today there is a great nostalgic return towards those retro technologies precisely because they sharpening the mind and stimulating creativity.
Funny thing: I got the same criticism when I started in the industry a bit more than 20 years ago (java, vb 6.0, etc…), and current “youngster” will probably say the same in 20 years time.
There will always be a majority of people using bloated framework simply because they are good enough, and there will always be a minority doing optimized code because they want to or are constrained by the specificity of their target environment. Nothing new here
It’s worth remembering that the almost disastrous “millenium bug” was caused by people trying to save space by using 6 digit dates instead of 8 digit.
Fortunately the industry was aware of the problem, and fixed it, so there were very few adverse consequences (except for the fact that fixing it cost a lot of money).
Well, for what it is worth here is another issue with Web+ in connection with Mattermost webapp: every time I log into Mattermost on web+ it crashes and there is no way I can find any logs for the crash: the bug reporter just fills up with popup windows that I cannot follow or understand!
If anybody wishes to understand my problem and needs info about the crashtell me what to do. Remember that once Web+ is closed by the bug hunter there is no way of sending any logs to this forum (no Web+, no connection to web!!)
I like Haiku and I am trying to make it work a bit more reliably, but when the internet browser stops, I am isolated and cannot work … sad but that is the way of the betas!
Thanks for creating Haiku, but it needs lots more to become reliable!!
It is better and easier to use than BSD or some linux distros…
Sorry to hear this. My work uses Mattermost so when I get a chance I’ll try logging in with WebPositive. Mattermost is a pretty intense webapp so I am not too surprised though a hard crash is disappointing.
(Insert rant here about how I’m in trouble at work because ext4 filesystem on small partitions don’t have 64bit time_t, nor does glibc, all of this because of people in the 1970s who decided to save 4 bytes of memory and set up a timebomb for future generations to handle).
I don’t care if my code is optimized to the maximum. I care that it runs fast enough for the needed process, and that is is correct and handles all cases. My customers probably agree with this, and want me to do things in the fastest or cheapest way possible. This means I’m definitely not writing all the code in hand optimized assembler to save a few bytes of memory. I use C++, I use boost and many other libraries, and it makes my life a lot easier, and allows me to build more complex software that was unthinkable of 30 or 40 years ago.
Saving 4 bytes wasn’t such a silly idea at the time when you remember that the capacity of Apple’s first hard disk was 5 MB. Yes, MB! It cost $0.7 per byte.
Saving space was therefore a developer’s main preoccupation. Things are very different now.
