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Comment by ChrisRR | Hacker News Reader

As an embedded developer it always makes me sad to see physicists and engineers pushing the limits of physics to make faster hardware, just for devs to squander that power with lazy programming.

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No, that's actually the point of faster chips: To make software development less challenging and cheaper.

Exactly. What people also miss that the complexity grew considerably because of the need to cover many more "edge" cases. 30 years ago, you could assume a rough display size (fixed layouts) and DPI (no scaling needed), assume ASCII / ISO-8859-1, assume that the user is able-bodied and doesn't need accessibility features, target just DOS etc.

There is also a lot of accidental complexity which you might be able to get rid of only by BC breaks, unfortunately.

Don't forget, back in the early days of the WWW, web pages weren't mostly annoying ads. These days, this is very, very important, so we dedicate a lot of computing resources to it.

No, it really isn't. The point of faster chips is for the user to be able to do more things and do them faster (without having to wait for the computer). This may mean more complex software that uses the added capabilities to do actually useful stuff that would not have been feasible before. It does not mean meaninglessly squandering performance on layers of abstractions because that takes slightly less developer time.

The point of faster chips is to make computer programs faster. We've increased performance a thousandfold and yet programs almost always take more than a frame (16ms) to update. Once everything is rendering at absolute 60FPS (and actually, 144FPS would be nice), and the hardware is reasonably cheap (Raspberry Pi cost perhaps), then the point is to make software development cheaper.

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