Comment by kraemate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kraemate | Hacker News Reader

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Am i the only one who thinks developers asking for good hardware is an extremely bad idea? All the greatest software ever written has been developed on extremely slow hardware (especially by today's standards). Fast compile times is an oft-cited reason, but you can always work on the program while it compiles. Are 'developers' these days really that perfect and busy that they need to build their 10GB codebase in 10 seconds? And they have /nothing/ else to do while it builds ?

According to me, all programmers should be given absolutely the bare minimum hardware to program on. This way we can eat our own dogfood and hopefully reduce program bloat. The primary reasons programs suck these days is because 'developers' have terabytes of RAM on their development boxes and consuming 1G of memory for an applet isnt a big deal for them.

I say give all these developers asking for more hardware a 386!

There is this concept of "flow"- a break in your concentration (for example, because your IDE is too slow to keep up with your typing) can often be enough to push you out of this state of flow.

Sure, if I know my compile is going to take a few minutes I can plan for it, and work on other stuff in the mean time.

But for me the tiny interruptions really add up, and contribute to me not being as productive as possible. This is especially true when you're hunting a bug, or working in a tight TDD loop where you're constantly editing/compiling/testing. Having to wait for the machine is a real morale-killer.

Devs should be required to _test_ on that older machine, and benchmarks should be recorded and distributed, to keep everyone aware of the base-supported-config performance.

The software can also suck from hundreds of hours of time being wasted by the older gear. If your competitors don't think the same way, you have a problem.

It would be way to easy to ignore and rationalize away numbers on a table, making it personal for them means automatically fast for every user.

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