Re:Discipline Doesn’t Scale
by imoverclocked on Wednesday October 21, 2020 @03:57AM
(#24845680)
... or reduce software engineering salaries. Arguably, people want faster software if they also want faster hardware.
Well, consider Slack as an example.
Performance-wise, it's bottom of the barrel quality. A single developer has done, in this compartment (Ripcord), much better than their team did. If we want to consider similar languages, Microsoft did enormously better with VSC.
The result is, sadly, that Slack is still widely used.
In the dawn of computing, machines were far less common, much more expensive, and society was willing to pay programmers boatloads of money to write optimized code because that was cheaper.
The hardware engineers did an excellent job, they reduced costs of computing by a lot. Society is not willing to pay programmers boatloads of money to write optimized code; because hardware is cheap, they can do fine without that optimization.
Whether we thing the pricing is correct or not is a different question I guess. We could theoretically raise computing prices artificially (say through taxation).