Fast Software, the Best Software

33 pointsposted 4 hours ago
by ustad

12 Comments

rossant

39 minutes ago

I fully agree. I loathe slow software. I hate bloat. I love fast software. As a developer, I'm completely, even irrationally, obsessed with speed, performance optimization, and profiling. I wish more developers felt the same way.

fmajid

an hour ago

No, no software is the best software.

BTW, the title should say "(2019)".

embedding-shape

an hour ago

Best solution is no software, or as little code as possible. But that the best software is no software isn't very practical or actionable :)

jdw64

14 minutes ago

Fast and efficient software varies depending on the local context, but for me, I think I'd be fine with something slower as long as it's convenient enough. After all, once it passes a certain threshold, I can barely even notice the speed difference anyway.

I wonder what OP's thinks of IDEs like VSCode. Would they see it as heavy and not great because it's Electron-based? But I find IDEs convenient.

Ygg2

29 minutes ago

Honestly, I'm in partially disagree camp. What matters is how much time it saves.

A good WYSIWYG editor will run circles around the fastest text editor. Even if WYSIWYG is a bit slower to open.

It would be preferable for software to be more focused and faster over time, but that doesn't attract people to it.

gsu2

an hour ago

This is slop; I stopped reading after this line:

> Fastness in software is like great margins in a book — makes you smile without necessarily knowing why.

EDIT: I didn't say _AI_ slop; it's just not well-written. In addition to the word salad quoted above, there's unsubstantiated jumps in logic and opinions that undercut the premise (e.g. "Speed and reliability are often intuited hand-in-hand" being followed later by an example of a "faster, simpler" application having "reliability issues"; or typewriters being "slow in a relative sense" while then praising simplicity of operation, task-focused design, and observability of state over speed); it feels like the author wanted to list out some random complaints but failed to tie them together in a way that felt worth reading.

EDIT 2: having now skimmed the article a few times, I think what the author actually wanted to say is not that software shouldn't be slow, but that it shouldn't be _frustrating_; "slow" is a very common way to frustrate, but not the only one.

robjimgreen

an hour ago

This is definitely not slop. I’ve followed Craig Mod’s work for a long time and he’s a prolific, talented, and very human writer.

stcg

an hour ago

What makes you think it is slop? The emdash?