What Today's Coders Don't Know and Why It Matters

jfruhlinger writes "Today's programmers have much more advanced languages and more forgiving hardware to play with — but it seems many have forgotten some of the lessons their predecessors picked up in a more resource-constrained era. Newer programmers are less adept at identifying hardware constraints and errors, developing thorough specifications before coding, and low-level skills like programming in assembly language. You never know when a seemingly obsolete skill will come in handy. For instance, Web developers who cut their teeth in the days of 14.4 Kbps modems have a leg up in writing apps for laggy wireless networks."

Comments

The problem is

[geekoid]

they aren't trained to engineer software, and the industry hasn't incorporated good engineering practices.

It doesn't matter.

[man_of_mr_e]

"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil" - Donald Knuth

Most developers will never need for their apps to run in constrained environments, and most employers don't want to spend money to eek out performance when average performance is perfectly fine.

Too many programmers get caught up in trying to make something the fastest, or most memory efficient, or makes the best use of bandwidth. When most of the time, it just doesn't matter. Such things are expensive, and in the long run it's cheaper to be fast and sloppy than slow and lean.

Re:It doesn't matter.

[Mitchell314]

You want spend the most effort to conserve the most expensive resource. And that is not the cpu, ram, or disk time. It's human time. Hell, even working for low wage, a person is expensive. Thus the most effort should be put in having them do the least effort. Unless you have a case where the hardware time is getting expensive, but that's the exception as hardware costs go down while salary doesn't.

And no, that's not an excuse to be sloppy. "Back in the ancient days" it was important to write good code for the limited resources. Now you still need to write good code, but the constraints are relaxed. But we still need code that is maintainable, dependable, extendable, flexible, understandable, etc.

Re:It doesn't matter.

[Vellmont]

Today's machines are over a hundred times faster than they were 10 years ago

The raw CPU power times the amount of cores is 100 times faster. How much faster is the I/O? Serving up web pages is mostly about I/O. I/O from the memory, I/O from the database, I/O to the end user. The CPU is usually a small part of it.

You actually sound like a perfect example of what the article is talking about. People who don't understand where the bottlenecks lie. Hell, it even mentioned the misunderstanding of the I/O bottlneck that exists today.

Re:tl;dr

[Dutch Gun]

I'd submit the game development industry is still one place where tight, fast-running code really matters. But the trick is, writing efficient code is extremely slow and expensive to develop. At my company, our game engine is written in C/C++ like most places, but we still write most of our tools in C# or Python (and from what I understand, that's also becoming the norm). We well understand that we're trading efficiency of execution for efficiency of performance in those cases. Both types of coding certainly have their place.

I get a little annoyed at zealots on both sides that claim that "C++ is dead" or "C# is too slow", blah, blah... If you ask a carpenter what is "best tool" is, he might ask you "for doing what?" Programming is no different. People who cling to a single language or paradigm are just missing the big picture, IMO.

Re:tl;dr

[BitZtream]

Your phone has 200MB of memory, so when a stupid app uses all 200MB ... then what? You don't run your other apps? Being wasteful is stupid regardless of where you do it, in your home, or in your code.

(computers did have double digit RAM at some point, right? My history of computer hardware isn't that great)

http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/product_card.asp?part_id=4605&category_id=163&family_id=607&subfamily_id=791

If you're too lazy to follow the link:

The high-performance, low-power Atmel 8-bit AVR RISC-based microcontroller combines 512B ISP flash memory, 32B SRAM

That '32B SRAM' is actually shared with the 16 general purpose registers, so if you take those out, you have 16 bytes of ram. With those 16 bytes and the rest of the IO and other functions built in you can easily control 3 servos from a single input line, which takes feed from a larger motor. That chip is capable of driving stepper motors with interpolation for a CNC machine, again taking position information from somewhere else, not processing the command tree itself. The chip is used to handle input from several glass breakage detectors and performing false positive checks to avoid triggering because the cat knocked something off that didn't actually break an external window.

In short, the modern world is built on devices with tiny ass amounts of ram. Do you wear a digital watch? They're getting rarer now days, but thats another example.

Its not history were that stuff mattered, its right now today, you just aren't aware of it. Nothing about the concepts used then is bad today, they STILL provide massive benefits if you know them and follow them. You're basically saying 'gasoline is cheap, just burn more to get more done' and ignoring the fact that there are clear physical limits to computing, a given amount of mass, regardless of how its configured, can only store so much data and performing so many computations. Eventually you'll have devices which simply can't meet the demand being put on them ... because people thought ram/processing power was cheap and we no longer need to worry about those old guys.

Locality of reference, cache hits, pipeline stalls ... all these things that you know nothing about, yet drastically affect how your shitty little app runs. Sigh, I swear at some point in the past people actually took pride in 'doing it right'.