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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

No, I don't think so. Today's software engineering is optimizing for minimizing dev time, and this comes at the expense of using more resources than are necessary to accomplish our tasks. Yesterday's software engineering was optimizing for minimizing resource use rather than dev time. That mindset makes a tremendous difference in how you approach the engineering.

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Software engineering is really distinct from computer science. The practices that are prevalent in an industry differ from the algorithms discovered in academia (or in industry)

>Software engineering is really distinct from computer science

I think both phrases are floating signifiers in practice.

Fair, but I think they at least attempt to signify pretty different things

One side is theory and the other practice. In theory, there is a clear difference. In practice, it’s a bit fuzzier.

(Yes, I know the original saying is that “in theory there is no difference, but in practice there is”… but this worked better in the context, which I guess, in some ways, also makes the same point).

Honestly I probably shouldn't have qualified it with in practice. They're both floating signifiers in theory and practice.

I think it is not 100% obvious if the question is actually about CS or coding. They say CS, but then ask about built in languages. Of course, CS advantages must have impacted language design, but a lot of it is just improving conventions, right?

It's very similar to how mechanics now replace whole parts rather than machine or rebuild them. The cost now are man hours, not the components themselves

Agreed: Most of the computers from earlier eras did not have the speed, memory or disk space to even remotely support most of the CS practices today. The raw speed, multiple cores and gargantuan memories of today's CPUs makes things like AI feasible. Many of the ideas we use today existed in the late 50s and 60s. They simply were not practical to implement.

I would agree, I would also add that generally programmers today are not used to dealing with the memory limits of '80s computers. What is now considered an embedded device, back then was a desktop. My smartwatch likely has more memory than a PC Jr.

No idea what smart watch you have but the latest (series 9) Apple Watch has (up to) 2 GB of RAM and 5 Tflop of computing power, while the PC junior had 256 kilobytes of ram and .33 megaflops of computing.

nodejs' main binary on my laptop is 44 MiB.

The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) we put a man on the Moon with could do 4 kilo instructions per second and 0.43 megaflops and had 2KB of RAM. Apple watch is roughly 900x as fast as the AGC while being being .67 x as large and less than 1% of the weight.

Vs the PC Jr, it's almost 2000x the size of an Apple watch and like 150x heavier.

That's a huge understatement. Galaxy Watch 7 has 5 cores, one of them 1.6 GHz A78 and 2 GB RAM.

In 2013 I bought Galaxy Gear which was one of the first smartwatches and even that one had 512 MB RAM. PC Jr. had a 64 KB RAM base in comparison.

ESP32 has more memory and more ROM than 5,25" disk... Not to even talk about clock speed...

And that is considered very affordable chip.

And yet, with today's CS, ESP32 can't do what a 8086 could do back then.

is it that it cannot do or that it is not the priority ?

Isn't it the same thing? CS has other priorities. Answer to the original question is "No, early 80s computers could not have had better software, because today's CS focuses on SaaS income, tracking users and having the tallest Jenga tower of dependencies."

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