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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

I remember being on a "compiler panel" AMA at a conference in the late 1980s. There were 5 of us on the panel, each representing a different C compiler. I was in the middle. We got asked "does your compiler system work on a floppy only machine?"

Vendor1: "Yes. We have a special install for it, carefully distribute the files among floppies, and you can do it."

Vendor2: "Yes, we can do it. It has a special install, blah blah blah."

Me: "Yes. It costs $200 extra and comes with a hard disk."

The question never progressed to Vendors 4 and 5, the question never came up again from anybody. That marked the end of the floppy-only era as far as I was concerned :-)

It still took some more years before we could stop distributing the compiler on a stack of floppies and go with a CD.

P.S. The price of a "hard card" (a hard disk on an expansion plug-in card) was $200 at the time.

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That's a brilliant answer.

As someone who has worked supporting a commercial compiler, it never ceases to amaze me how companies will pay 6 figures per seat for development tools, and then install them on a 5 year old machine that wasn't fit for the title "workstation" when it was brand new.

True, that does happen, but at Zortech we discovered that the professional segment of the market was not price sensitive for just that reason - the price of the dev tools was noise compared to the cost of developer time.

> As someone who has worked supporting a commercial compiler, it never ceases to amaze me how companies will pay 6 figures per seat for development tools, and then install them on a 5 year old machine that wasn't fit for the title "workstation" when it was brand new.

Well, because the dev shop buys the dev tools, but general desktop IT buys the computers, with policies around limiting number of different builds in the organization for IT convenience, and distribution policies for new machines based on internal politics (if you are in th chain of command above the head of the unit in charge of the hardware, or politically connected to someone in that position, you and your staff can get newer, better machines, whether or not you have a real business need, and even if that means denying someone else with a real business need.)

Or, at least, I've seen enterprise shops like that.

I wish companies would force developers to use much slower machines than they are normally given, so that they will be more efficient with what they do, since chances are that the majority of your users won't be running extremely high-end hardware either.

...and I'm saying this as a developer myself.

Very good point. I've thought that about Google, starting years ago. Look at the Wave fiasco / failure. That would not have happened (at least due to reasons of unusable slowness) if your suggestion had been implemented there. And there are many other examples of their products needing more machine horsepower. On the contrary, they equip their developers with high-end machines. How dumb. It should at least be a mix of low and high-end, and should be made compulsory to test the products on low-end satisfactorily before release.

It still happens, see Android development experience with Studio and build times.

Yes, seen tangentially earlier, when I consulted to a startup using Android as one of the stacks. Happy I did not have to work on it, going by what I have read about its too frequent changes. Like the JavaScript framework du jour :)

https://mobile.twitter.com/vasudevram/status/127075265940270...

I always used an older, slower machine, and that was one of the reasons. Still do, my main machine is about 8 years old.

Idk, waiting on a task kick me out of the zone real fast, and as I age it takes longer for me to get into it.

Building the dmd D compiler with itself takes a few seconds.

I've visited customers where we hit "build" and then wait about 15 minutes for an incremental build of a project.

Every day I was there they could have bought a faster machine with the amount of money they were paying me to wait for builds to complete. They were developing embedded software, so the "dogfooding their customer's machines" was non-sensical.

Doing 4th generation programming language is what we forced ourself into. Instead of complied in minutes we do one run in 5 hours using a mainframe . And our boss said it is better than 1960s using visual approach.

Tragedy of the commons.

If you do this, your programmers will leave your company. And your competitors will offer them better computers.

You'd need all software companies to sync and do this, or at least a large majority.

I think a good solution is to have a lowest common denominator machine, and rotate developers through using it for a day, maybe once a month.

Windows

Celeron

2-4gb ram

5400rpm hard drive

No administrative privileges

Shitty antivirus installed

1080p monitor

I've tried a few times to get into Twitch streaming (as a viewer), though I don't play video games. I've come across a few programmers who've chosen to host streams there. Besides other reasons that also contribute to the failures of those experiments, I come away thinking about how unusably bad the Twitch website is. It hit me for the first time a few weeks ago why that was.

Not quite. Run your tests on an old machine. I remember testing some software over a slow dial-up line (1990s) and it was possible to see how slowly certain actions were painted on the screen. Being able to see that allowed me to make optimisations I wouldn't otherwise have considered.

Or at least test on lower class machines.

Well, now you often have an overreaction to this problem, when web developers work on their Javascript frontends and Electron applications on the latest, beefiest Macbooks and blazing fast internet speeds and get completely out of touch with what their end users might be using. (This comment was written on an i9, 64gb RAM Macbook Pro provided by my employer).

My first hard drive was around that era. It was 40 MB and $900. Hooked it up to a IIgs. $200 doesn't sound like enough. :-)

Mine, as well. This was the late 80's and a 30 meg hard drive ("SupraDrive" for the Amiga) cost around $700 or $800.

I might have the year wrong.

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