Hi, i really loved that song and its been a long time since i listen to it, could you help me out and tell me the song's name? I'd preciate it a lot, thanks☺️

That intro song + trailer sequence is way too long and way too self-indulgent and not nearly as insightful or even funny as it would need to have been to be bearable. I regret sitting through most of it. Everybody who still wants to give the actual talk a chance should just skip to 10:34.

PS: To make things worse, that trailer is really an ad for his company, which the speaker proceeds to praise, so they really should have ticked that paid promotion checkbox, even if the payment is the speaker's salary, because it's illegal in several jurisdictions not to.

​@@ropersonline waaaay to long indeed

We had toggle switches and didn't need to keyboard. Days Of DEC equipment and EMC io boards.

Also US was scraping for programmers from around the world during that time. My father (who was a programmer) got a job offer from American company despite the fact that we were living in the middle of Russia.

I didn't need to fix my code much for the feared Y2K. Internally all my programs used the UNIX time (So we will have a 2032-or something problem, but I expect to be dead by then, so not my problem) and mostly I just displayed the proper year number, like 1999. My program really didn't have much of manual data entry anyway, practically all the data was collected from various devices and time-stamped by the millisecond. This presented the BIG problem: How to syncronise all the clocks of every computer in the system?

The stuff I work on still hasn't moved to 8 digit dates. The suits are currently trying to figure out which consulting firm's gonna help us out of this mess...

Aah yes NYSE. I worked for them for almost 15 years. We had an absolute nightmare scenario where we had software running at a customer (because NYSE sold software at the time) where due to miscommunication? Half the codebase of that piece of software disappeared. After all it was no longer used anywhere... Except at this one big customer in Asia which was missed by upper management.

a 10 min song woah

@@knuti27 8 minutes of song 2 minutes of video clips

Best post here in the comments, life saver

Honestly, that song was worth it though.

Choose not to miss the song! What an apt depiction of how we do things. Don't miss the opportunity to laugh at yourself!

nerds replaced movie slot with conference videos :) ngl, conf videos are more fun anyways.

he really is

9

finishing his degree could have saved a lot of stupid design that's holding everyone else back, then. Look up Amdahl's law. I learned it in OS. You might also encounter it in Programming languages or Data structures and algorithms, whichever course, you'd know you can't just fucking run twice as fast on twice the hardware.

@@Sam-cp6so he came with us when he was a student! 3rd year! That’s how terrible these colleges have become. A lot of stupid management and terrible actually practical courses. That’s what you get when IBM and Getronics have influence on syllabus. Two big corporations who need to hire external engineers because they do t have them on the payroll. Educational has been dumbed down and this was 15 years ago, it’s even worse now!!! Pay 40k a year to learn crap you could learn from books in quarter of the time.

@@CallousCoder my experience in uni so far has struck me as them being pulled in two directions. Students and employers demand "practical" knowledge but its not a fucking "coding degree". Its a computer science degree. The "impractical" stuff is important, but its not obvious to most people.

@@shdowdrgonrider well, this is an interesting point. We in the Netherlands we have (had) tradeschools on BSc. and non-BSc level where you’d actually learned the trade. Like in my case I did tradeschool electrical engineering - with more CS and programming that BSc CS students have nowadays. There you were supposed to learn the applied knowledge and only breeze over the theoretical academic knowledge. This student, I wrote about was a BSc tradeschool student. But that has been thrown overboard in favor of the academic non-applicable syllabus. And frankly CS is not a 3 year academic course unless you deep dive into a single field. Basic data structures and design is something you could easily do in 2 or 3 semesters. Academic courses always had the problem that the graduates don’t really have a value for the marketplace because it’s sheer theoretical knowledge. They aren’t great at coding when they leave, they aren’t great in networking or sysadmin or design. So what is the value of that education? Learning for learning sake seems to be a non valuable approach. Just like a degree in ancient linguistics (my cousin is a professor in that). Fun and all that but it doesn’t make you employable or useful in today’s society. In my opinion, you go to school to become employable or to become able to make your own business. But ironically business schools don’t teach you how to create and run a business. And Computer Science doesn’t teach you how to actually work in an IT job effectively. Franky I don’t see the value anymore in today’s higher educational system. You still have to learn the actual details and applicable knowledge yourself. I don’t need a degree in anything to learn that. Back when I went to “college” aka tradeschool it made sense because you don’t have access to SMD soldering ovens, or heavy tools or expensive microcontrollers and eprom burners and CAD/CAM software back then. So the value was sheerly the practical subjects because of these tools. The whole theory (and there was a lot of that) was/is well documented and you can just find for free online. I didn’t need a teacher, regurgitating it verbatim form a book. But CS, linguistics, business, arts is something you can do all by yourself. And do it faster and more affordable. And don’t get me wrong academic studies for people who sheerly want to be academic is fine. But don’t bother me as a tax payer with your learning hobby 🤣 And that’s what was so great about the separation of tradeschools and university (MSc and PhD) levels until 20 years ago. When you wanted to become a rich tradesman you went to an HBO or MBO tradeschool. And if you wanted to solely be in academia, living on a meager research salary, you went to a university and do the whole MSc, PhD and professor route.

@@shdowdrgonrider I think Dylan’s example of the “sheds” he learned to make in university was very sound. I guess in tradeschool we didn’t get past a cottage either. But it at least was residential 🤣

So Brandolini seems suggest the best thing for all involved is that the DM quits to work on something else That way You don't have to deal with your legacy and the Company will solve the critical dependency problem faster

@@hens0w That's not good advice on its own. It's the equivalent of throwing the instruction manual in the fire. You're getting rid of the one person that can actually help to refactor the code. If I found myself in that position, I'd want to take on an apprentice, or lead a time, and take time to put things down on paper. Even when you're doing a big re-write, you need understand what it is that you're rewriting. It's not often you can treat a rewrite as if it were a green-fields project. I would say the responsible thing would be to write a Dungeon Master's Guide (something like a C4 Model), and a Player's Handbook (Code Annotations), and a Monster's Manual (Annotated Test Suite). And, encourage your players to micro-GM within their own specialities. Just as it D&D, the job of a GM shouldn't be to railroad play. It should be to facilitate play, and provide a backdrop for players to interact with, in a predictable, and consistent manner. They are there to arbitrate decisions, rather than to enforce a strict definition of the rules. The same should be true within this scenario. Your team lead shouldn't dictate your code, line-by-line; and they shouldn't railroad decisions through, when your have valid concerns, or suggestions. In RPGs, the players also have a responsibility to keep checks on the GM, and unionise against bad roleplay, where found. An inexperienced, or just plain bad GM can ruin a game with even the best players. Players should be able to tell the GM that they're being a dick; and the GM should be able to take those criticisms to heart, and actually make changes for the better, even at their own expense. The roleplay is more important than the roleplayer.

@@ApacheGamingUK if you found yourself in that position you should use the insane amount of leverage you have to form a labor union

@@ApacheGamingUK Also rolling for initiativ makes for really structured meetings :)

This is the best description of legacy code I've heard yet lol. So true about the unknown requirements. It's tough too knowing the code we write today eventually becomes legacy code, and the requirements and blockers leading us to specific implementations will be lost with time.

@@seancpp Especially since a lot of the requirements are arbitrary business needs rather then technical ones. It would be nice to have some easy marker in the code to say "nothing bad will happen if you change this"

@@traveller23e That's what whitespace is. Unless you're writing in Python… or Whitespace.

I worked in 2 of the 3 major banks and yes they are. But in both banks a little or time is spend on decommissioning systems and cloud migrations to cut away legacy and bloat. But there is another problem there, that is that often other consumers of systems are not willing to say goodbye to a system for whatever reason. We tried to decommission a system of which our system was the Golden source. And we said: “tells us where to put the data and we get it done.” We were provisioning the new system already but some people were still using the old system as there was not a complete replacement. Ironically we had a bug in a driver using that system that would hang out processing. The lead engineer who designed the whole system and developed that agent. Was sure it was a Microsoft bug. And I was like: “it’s the agent, as I’m now running MIM with the same version too or that other system you’ve build and it chucks through nicely.” He didn’t believe me so I said: “everyone you see the agent hang, let me know I will do a brief investigation.” 4 weeks later I had found the edge case that would every now and then (2 times a month) hang the agent. And that was when we were copying the source data some data was deleted. And my colleague checked if the number of records he counted were copied. Before there was no deletion because it was an operating system. And banks don’t delete data then but mark it as deleted. So I fixed it and my colleague was like: “waste of time in 2 months the system is gone.” I left almost 2 years ago. I rejoined a new team back in December and that system was just decommissioned…. But only the frontend :) So our agent probably is also still running.

@@CallousCoder Very interesting! It sounds like the hard part isn't the building or the setup or the maintenance, but its the convincing the humans to use the new system so they can benefit from it. What is the time frame that is expected for decommissioning from the point of starting the plan for the new system to full implementation and staff training?

@@whtiequillBj and to motivate the techs and managers to engineer the new solutions. But complacency is a big part. As we say in Dutch: “maar het werkt toch?” “But it’s working right?” And then those technologies will shoot root. But it’s definitely the human factor that allows systems to live on. But that’s also what Dylan says. People are afraid, I think people are complacent to do hardwork. :) Otherwise sandboxes would pop-up and they’d be experimenting to get ownership. Although the later used to be impossible with banks. Resources had to be approved and be defended. Now with the cloud that’s a lot easier.

My bank still insists I live in a local authority which was abolished 30 years ago.

That's because he doesn't work in the financial sector, rather some small startup that serves the entertainment industry. I seriously doubt casting directors would lose their s$%& if his webapp went down. Banks OTOH trade on a single commodity with their customers-trust. They can't afford mistakes. He tries to convince us that people are scared to touch legacy code. Nothing could be further from the truth. When you have code that has run error free for a decade or longer, that is not by chance. It took a lot of debugging throughout the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, to get there. Now, some hotshot programmer thinks he or she can do better??? Go pound sand. That's why banks are "stuck in their ways". It would take probably another 50 years to re-invent the wheel.

If you have code that is too scary to update or too profitable to change, that means you don't have truth-worthy automation tests (your safety net) for it.

Good legacy code is wonderful. It never breaks, it gives you insight into a whole different world, and sometimes a chuckle when you find a comment that just says "TODO: fix this mystery bug" from 1996. I do however take complaint with a completely different class of code, originally written with the primary objective of time to market, designed by an architect in a rush and an unclear idea of the end goal, and programmed by people who were being clocked by the minute in their implementations of vague requirements. Those sorts of codebases tend to be atrocious, even if they follow MVVM or some other modern pattern to a t.

You are thinking of 64k. 64k was enough to hold dos with a little extra. 640k was maxing out your dos system to the top spec, although you could do even more with extended memory on a 286.

Markdown is also fairly new, so that's another indicator. (Or course, the output filename ending in .md doesn't actually mean that what's written to it is markdown, but that's what I first reacted to.)

You either die to unit tests or live long enough to become the legacy code.

It can be terrible to begin with and become legacy code regardless. Skipping the whole thrown away step.

@@SianaGearz You're right. Don't know what I was thinking, as I often enough see code that should have been thrown away before deploying.

the people who have to make changes to those systems care though - and you care that the systems continue to work... so what do you do when you need a change to a cobol system and nobody knows cobol anymore? thats the reality you are dealing with and compared to something like architecture or mechanical engineering... software engineering is incredibly young want to know how often steam engines in the early days simply exploded? and as a final little thing... bridges are inspected and overhauled every couple of years, because if they are not maintained and adapted to the current circumstances...they might start to fail same is true for planes - they get maintenance even more often and a lot of their parts are replaced to make them as reliable as they are legacy code is the equivalent of a bridge that has not been inspected for a hundred years... it looks solid... and plenty people use it just fine... but would you put a truck over it? or build a rail line over it?

@@SharienGaming steam engines blew up, sure but they fixed those problems within 10-20 years. Airplanes went from barely able to fly 100 meters to supersonic in 43 years! Software only gets slower the more computing power we create 😆Due to kids no longer knowing how to write assembly or even C or C++ and thus result in using Python and JavaScript. IT isn’t young, it’s over 70 years old! I am an EE by education and to my amazement had better education about software engineering and system design than CS graduates. And I don’t see commitment by (especially young engineers) to deep dive into legacy code. It’s legacy not because it’s old, it’s legacy because devs don’t want to dive into it and maintain it, but it is important since it is running and making money. And concerning maintenance, that’s all mechanical parts that experience stresses and elements. Code doesn’t do that! Code doesn’t age doesn’t deteriorate. And electronics don’t get serviced anymore. Because we engineered the fuck out of it to the point that my C64 from 35 years still works and my ST as well. Legacy code is a psychological problem but a technical problem. People don’t want to deep dive and put in effort to understand something. Most born after 1985 don’t even have the basic experience to understand lower level stuff that was normal to use up the the early 00s. Because everything is abstracted away. Most devs I know can’t even use a command line! Seriously!!! So I disagree, we as a branch are immature and we don’t want to mature. Otherwise we wouldn’t create a new language every other week and a new framework every two years. And yet the stuff that the generation before me made still rules supreme, C/C++ assembly. Yesterday I solved a bug issues at a sort of legacy system a CI/CD pipeline which my colleague developed who left. And I understand azure pipelines well and eventhough his way of working is totally not my style I was able to find a bug and solve it. Even more interesting was that where the issues showed was ofcourse the system it was deployed at Azure Data Factory. I had never even touch ADF (I don’t care for click ETL), but hey my colleagues were stuck. So I just asked them how do you do this? How does that work? Can I see this? I could Google that too and would’ve if they weren’t there. And within 20 minutes I had found the root cause. And 10 minutes later the solution. A simple oversight in the CI/CD pipeline but one that would’ve never ever happened in electrical engineering or aerospace! And one that would’ve been easily caught if we had time to mature and have mature tools (we work with stupidly immature tools). He had forgotten to parameterize a user principal. And he had forgotten because he started development and only targeted a single environment. Despite me saying time and time again, start to develop with multi environment in mind. We are going to deploy to other environments! But that’s harder and more time consuming and you have to throughly test and think. And he left that part for me to solve after he’d left. Now I could’ve said: “it’s crap it’s not multi environment. We need to remake it.” Instead I was pragmatic and thought: “damn he got a superb sql deployment scheme and he got ADF deployment working and security checks. It will take me 3 months to do all that and I need to learn ADF, let’s just make sure this becomes multi environment.” And a proper toolset that Microsoft should’ve made would be to parse the yaml and warn when parameter assignments were literal assignments; because generally you don’t want that. I ran into bugs with that Yaml parser that I wonder how the fuck did Microsoft test this? Because you need to make a fucking effort to fuck up a logical operation and not be able to parse certain things dynamically and others you can. That is bad engineering! And you wouldn’t see that in civil- aerospace engineering.

@@SharienGaming oh and if you want to earn big money spend a month or 3 learning cobol! Those guys earn 200 euros an hour at the bank! I would learn it if the subject matter would’ve be boring financial processing. Stuffy business processes are not my thing. I also wouldn’t do that in C++ or Java if they asked - and they have asked 😄

@@CallousCoder code doesnt age? dont make me laugh ive seen and had to maintain code that has aged terribly - because the technologies it was built with or integrated with have become insanely outdated and unsupported (in part to the point that not even documentation on it exists anymore) sure the lines of code have not changed in that time... but everything around it has and that code has had at least 4 different teams work on it... probably more... and you can absolutely tell, because each new team had a different approach and probably didnt understand half the tricks and conventions the people before them used... and thats how the code reads i can deep dive into shit like that and figure it out... but in the same time i can probably build half the system from scratch as well do you know why new higher level languages are used so much rather than low level languages, even though the performance is lower? because maintainability is much more valuable than speed sure you can optimize the shit out of c code (even more so assembly) but good luck for anyone else understanding what the code does when you need to make changes... heck good luck understanding it yourself when you look at it about a year later that is why methodology and languages change so much... because we have learned a lot from the past and from the cost of building software in that way and yes, electronic computers may be 70 years old... but software engineering as a discipline is still developing and significantly younger than that and also... errors like you described from your collegue HAVE happened and do happen in aerospace engineering... yes they do get caught by stringent testing and layer over layer of redundancies and checks... and even with that...sometimes they make it through anyway... because humans are humans and we make mistakes thats also why methods like test driven development, code reviews, integration testing, pair programming and many more exist... they provide multiple levels of checking for mistakes but it takes time for something like that to propagate... with something like aerospace engineering matters likely were significantly sped up through governments imposing legal requirements on procedures, because there always were lives on the line... with software? often only the engineers care and their managers often dont give a damn, because testing takes time and slows feature releases down... mind you they usually get the bill for everything slowing down from accumulating technical debt and errors going through... but that rarely makes the manager learn the correct lesson so if can you please get off your high horse then ill get off your lawn

@@SharienGaming now your last paragraph is what matters. Other industries are mature because they are bound to procedures because life’s are at stake. They therefore take the to engineer something and pass the certification tests. But your solutions care and matter too! So managers and devs should care more about quality and maturity than about the quick to market, and the new shiny thing idiocy that reigns supreme and is the reason of such terrible systems that we have today. And software engineering really started in 1947 when Kathleen Booth inverter assembly opcodes to program with less errors (see back then they were engineering) Another issue for our branch’s immaturity, is the fact that software is too easy to fix. I often hear or read in release notes: “there’s a bug, but we release it and fix it later.” That doesn’t happen in proper engineering fields. When was it when you bought a carb and you got a note: “we know that sometimes your indicator lights will fail but we will probably fix it next time when you come for an oil change” 🤣 I have probably a far more sinister look at this increasingly immature branch as I studied EE, you can’t really change hardware so you must get it right before you send it into the world! And I started my career in designing and building bespoke research tools for science projects, so electronics and the embedded software for parts of a solar telescope and my own whole project was designing measuring equipment that autonomously could measure the fluctuations or the height of snow and ice on Antarctica. Our team designed certain parts of satellites (not me as I wasn’t senior enough yet, only the old geezers who had successful smaller projects; something we also should do in IT - proven own projects makes you a senior and not your amount of projects or duration in the business). But we truly engineered the solutions and we made sure that our stuff was resilient, redundant, power consumption was known and batteries were over speced because there’s no influence on the weather and I don’t feel like hoping on a plane and hiking 2 days through a blizzard on the Antarctic ice sheets to swap a battery or wipe the snow of the solar panel 🤣 But we couldn’t fit a car battery either because researchers had to hike with those machines to put them wherever the wanted the measurements taken. I heard 3 years ago that 22 of the 30 of my Antarctic snow measuring and ice measuring devices that I’d designed in 1993 still work and are operational and still “maintained”; Hmmm lowlevel assembly rules, because you got to do everything yourself and there aren’t obscure poorly designed libs or frame works that have unknown behaviors. Especially on a bare metal proprietary made microcontroller system. 😄 And your software didn’t decay, your hardware platform became obsolete. Which is a bit of a misnomer , if it runs it runs and again a show of immaturity of our branch. I also worked at IBM (2 years didn’t like the company) but those lovely OS390 mainframes can still run all the code from the 360! That was 37 years ago and I know at the bank I consult for now, that their 60s code base for transaction processing still runs, so that’s 60+ years old. And no plans to move it from cobol to Java - most has been migrated away as cost saving. Because as you said cobol devs are rare and expensive but mainly running a mainframe with support is the real running expense. So they reduced the number for mainframes to only 3; again proper engineering from IBM. We have two datacenters so two mainframes but you need a tiebreaker in case transactions give different outcomes. How many devs these days even know how to write parallels transaction systems to guarantee that the right amount of moneys is put into your account or taken out? Those are aerospace engineering practices. So let’s agree to kick these careless managers in the balls and take the time to properly test and engineer and give them the Fucking finger of they want to release shit that hasn’t been properly tested. Because as also a software consumer I am getting fucking annoyed with buggy OSes and software. Especially the crap that Fucking breaks after a mandatory update - hey Apple and Microsoft!!!

Something I want to know: Does the Customer know what he is buying?

GSM/CDMA (i.e. 2G) is often still in service though afaik, and that's what the first iPhone had - the second had 3G and was called "iPhone 3G".

You don't need Microservices for that, properly written code will have at least most of those properties as well

ukposts.info/have/v-deo/aKl8mm6LqYKGsKs.html Felienne Hermans • GOTO 2016

@@scurvofpcp Thanks!

So is brainfuck and xslt. Doesn't mean it's practical.

PowerPoint is turing complete as well... but I've never managed to program any microcontroller in PPT C, C++, Rust, ASM are your options. The most widely accepted of those is C

As there exist no infinite memory, no Turing complete machine is possible.

@@NataliaBazj without waiving the memory being infinite, Turing Completeness becomes utterly useless as a concept, so why even bring it up?

You're counting everything in the repo which also includes device drivers, etc. - the kernel proper (as in, in the kernel/ directory) is around 100k (closer to 150k nowadays)

@@SimonBuchanNz Thanks. I got the number from a talk with Torvalds Linus.

Do we though?... The amount of skill and time it requires to do what you recommend versus the 'bloatware' approach does, evidently, not weigh up to the benefits of doing it like that... or at least it doesn't pay enough to entice would-be developers to learn and practice such things. Hardware resources are too cheap compared to skilled dev labor, so no company is going to pay for it when they can make MORE money selling 3 'bloatware web crap' apps instead of 1 'streamlined optimized efficient' app.. the customer doesn't give a shit. Unless your App literally drains all of their phone batteries they're not gonna complain... Hell, Facebook (back when I still used it) would drain your battery for no particular reason.. and that was way after they became the de-facto social media platform (so they had PLENTY of money to invest in a streamlined app if they so chose). The only mitigating argument I can imagine that would support your claim despite this would be the environmental one. (all those extra calculations do consume more electricity after all).. yet I don't think "forcing developers to write efficient code" is going to make it very highly on your local political 'green' party's to-do list.

@@ayporos time is pretty much the same. A good C/C++ developer codes as quickly as a JavaScript noob. That comes from experience, C++ is after all a pretty high level language. If you write bloatware, then you obviously spend more time doing all that extra inefficient code. I often find it frustrating when I need to do Python or PowerShell that I need to lookup trivial things that I know how to do in C/C++ And I even rewrote a program we use in our pipeline to search and replace a key value pair list from a json file in a target file and encode it. With a Rust application. Because starting a native application goes so much faster that a PowerShell one where the build agent needs to download the libraries. It would take 30 seconds to start. Mine less that a seconds to start the task. And doing that for several deploy tasks does add up. But I agree that customers don’t give a hoot. And that’s the whole problem. It sucks the fun and professionalism out of the job. And I’m no green tree hugger. I am not afraid for climate change doom scenarios. But this is indeed very easy reduction in energy abuse. And my customer really wants the cloud resources to be as used as little as possible to reduce costs. And ironically we are wrangling very inefficient azure cloud processes to scale up and down resource. And turn off resources in down time. Which requires a lot of extra development time in runtime management pipelines. When we would efficiently code that ETL process in C++ or Rust. It would run within probably 10-15 minutes compare the 45-70 minutes using SSIS. And all the stale data I would’ve removed already. Because stale data costs! Which I now have to remove with scripts on moving the unified database (I also pushed 7 databases into one using schemas and there’s a lot of data duplication because of the 7 databases, we w at to tackle). Because they simply didn’t think it through and instead of making it multi tenant they created a database instance per client. Because it was “easy and fast”. It’s now harder and takes longer to undo that stupidity they came up with 15 years ago. And we can reduce almost 90GB of data duplication - that’s including the stale data I already remove when moving. And that’s a throw of the database size. Back in 1995 we had database in MUMPS that ran a whole veterinarian clinic with on average 2500 animals dossiers. Average database was 60MB. We had on average 6 terminals connected to a 386 to 486. And 6/10 printers. And large veterinarian clinics about to 12/16 terminals and 20/25 printers. It was super efficient. When our company got bought the new dumb owner wanted a rich desktop experience. It bombed as we predicted. Because the ascii terminals were cheap, secure and it ran super fast even on that MUMPS environment. And the data as with the same data just daft encoding. Became on average 500MB. An invoice run became slower because of all the postscript full graphics none sense. And the vets were like: “I don’t give a fuxk that I can print my logo in full colour. I buy preprinted paper. I want a run to be done in the same time as before. Be sitting waiting on printers is more costly”. 10 years later I did hardware integration for a pharmacy information system. They too worked with text based terminals albeit already on PCs with terminal emulation. They made the same mistake. Went full on UI and I warned the owner and instructed him to look at the ladies behind the counter whisk through the terminals. All the single letter no enter or tab to select a menu. The even typed a head of the screen. It’s sheer rode working. And the order pick robots (that I integrated) are there to eliminate the time walking to a drawer. But no, full on UI was the things of the 2000s. Well that went down the drain fast. He lost half of his customer base. Because real users do mind speed. And now all these systems are mouse heavy. And it takes so much longer to get your meds. It adds 10-20 seconds. Which is ironic because the real hard thing (the mechanical parts of these robots) have almost tripled in the last 20 years. It’s a marvel of engineering but the systems doing the registration and validation and scanning. Have noticeably slowed down. And I notice that also with the length of the queue we are waiting in. Last week for this channel I wrote a little program to turn movies into an ASCII art PNG sequence - after I did a streaming version, that obviously has some dropped frames. And I started with encoding a 3 minute clip in 2 hours. And I was like… that’s stupid slow. Where’s the biggest slowdown? Oh that’s the Magick++ library. Hmmm I could use Qt I know how to image wrangle with that (I used in a lot of VFX projects). But then next to OpenCV I would need another massive library. Nope, let’s wrestle with OpenCV to turn strings into PNGs/ that took all but 20’minutes. Then it ran in 12 minutes. Which I thought was still too slow. And made it multi threaded. Because I wanted a clip to be rendered faster than the clip took to play. Know I churn through a 3 minute clip in 54 seconds. And that’s not even super optimized as I can optimize it even better. But that would take considerable amount of glue logic. In order to have a thread pool that’s atomic safe. Would take me an hour to do that. To shave off maybe 20 seconds per run. I would do that for production code! But the ought clip I’ll transform then this is good enough. But I know most developers these days would have stuck with OpenCV and Python and be 10-20 times slower. Why do computer vision with Python? Have some divinity people!

blender is a great example of two worlds colliding actually. its core is in c++, but ui fully in python. seeing how well both the cycles x project (c++) & ui overhaul (python) went in terms of increasing performance & usability, i'd say hard fast & easy slow languages both have their respective places in the industry

Video rendering software is where performance matters much more. Cutting off even a few seconds of render time can be a big deal. But why would anyone these days write a web app in a low level language, e.g. some CGI stuff in C or C++? Maybe if they host it on ancient hardware with severely limited resources.

@@martinsdicis4000 well also web apps have high workloads because of multi user. My client is a bank, if you see the amount of containers that are spun up for some customer services, it’s insane! Knowing that Python is 100 times slower than C/C++ and Node about it 10-20 times you can reduce the number of containers 10-100 times. Now that saves enormous amounts of energy )if you are afraid of climate change , not me but most millenials who develop this bloatware do, then there you can really make a difference. And also financially it’s a massive saving. If you run a single instance it doesn’t matter but we often spin up at times as many as 500-1000 containers. And ironically the database backend, which are properly written in a low level language don’t croak. The redundancy we have there is mainly for data consistency and availability. So your code efficiency does matter when it comes to heavy workloads. You can safe a lot. Funny enough my customers before the bank, we’re energy companies. And we knew when it was tax season as we saw prognosis of energy demand go up. That’s all because of the 3 major banks the end users hitting those banks and the IRS. And we talk about as much as 40-70MW extra of energy. That’s a about 10 windturbines that run a 100% efficiently! So imagine everybody wrote efficient code in C++ (or Rust) and we could reduce that a factor 10! We only have a 7MW extra consumption. Which our clients (greenhouses) can deliver with their diesel generators that are already running anyways to heat the greenhouse and produce CO2 for the plants. The biggest growth of our energy consumption isn’t cars or planes but cloud data centers! And majority of stupid TikTok and Instagram videos and cat pictures 😉

see, PHP is an exception in that it was never enjoyable in any way shape or form

It reminds me of the old joke... when your driving in the countryside and you get completely lost, then you spot a local with bailing-string holding up his trousers and hay in his hair and you stop, open the window and ask "excuse me please, how can I get to such and such a place". The local replies "well, I wouldn't go from 'ere".