Web applications don't follow Moore's law (Google developer)

colijn.ca

15 points·oxyona··4 comments

"But Joel's assertion that Google doesn't understand the big problems and isn't working on general solutions to those problems is patently false, as is his suggestion that all work on optimizing AJAX apps will be wasted in 6 months."

Peter didn't read the same essay I did, he's fixated on some trivial statement, or he's deliberately setting up a straw man version of Joel's argument. Joel's point, as I took it, is that people too committed to rolling their own everything out of misplaced focus on performance _now_ are going to miss out on the performance and interoperability improvements that will be coming in the future.

Here's an example from Mac software history that Joel may be ignorant of: WriteNow, a word processor, was well known for being blazingly fast. It was the only application in its class written in hand-tuned 68K assembly. Everyone bowed before the WriteNow team's accomplishments...until the PowerPC Macs came along and made their codebase obsolete. Oops!

I'm not sure there's anything that people wanting to build non-trivial apps _now_ can do about Joel's vision of the future, except understand that it very well may be coming.

peter was making the point that moore's law won't, for example, make my round-trip latency from sf to boston much less than 90ms, so optimizing to reduce round-trip times (and to a lesser extent, bandwidth) will _always_ be necessary to design snappy interfaces on the web.

Just to be clear: he didn't say "always." He said, "any time soon."

The amount of multimedia on the internet will expand to fill the pipes just enough to slow down everyone else's mission critical data. Better find a way to optimize round trips or you're toast.

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