nixCraft 🐧if you want new ideas, read old code.
Radio Azureus@nixCraft
#Code Is never old #programming Lines are Infinite
Chao-c'@RadioAzureus @nixCraft I think programming today is more like gluing stuff together or playing with lego.
(almost) nobody thinks about underlying algorithms any more. Most people just import existing libraries for (almost) everything. (Including me, but I at least remember times, when inventing useful or faster or memory efficient algorithm was a thing...)
I'm one of those people who still wrote static HTML in periods where people were already working with #database back ends
I knew how to do the #programming with them, with a database or more, it was just more fun to write #static #HTML that I learned by head
@RadioAzureus @nixCraft well, I not only wrote static HTML, but in 1996-1999, I maintained my own graphical WWW browser for DOS (which was written in C). So I actually parsed early "quirky", pre-XML HTML in Netscape era. (but I failed to implement javascript interpreter and abandoned the project)
Actually, I still remember some Z80 machine instructions (0xcd ... call subroutine). But this is not what I mean, I was never really (successfully) low-level (like others were) and I am not feeling nostalgic for that.
I mean, today there are no programmers, who would implement bubblesort or quicksort themselves and be able to appreciate the performance difference, or so. All high level programming languages implement all basic algorithms and even if you implement rudimentary algorithm, the raw power of modern PC still perform adequately, so people don't really have to think about optimizing anything.
On the other side of the story, datacenters consume 10-20% of all energy in developed countries and even if we don't consider deliberately stupid things like proof-of-work crypto or
unintentionally stupid stuff like AI, there is still huge amount of code, which just wouldn't have to run. Just few days ago, I participated in debate "I would run this database query over few milion records from RAM disk, instead of thinking how to choose only (indexed) GPS coordinates from given rectangle or polygon". And this is just amateur project with literally few online users - think about corporations doing the same for millions of users...
So we are expected to develop nuclear fusion just to power computers to run bloated, inefficient, not optimized applications based on dummy SQL querries? 🤔
@RadioAzureus @nixCraft It is always fascinating to analyze which skills are needed in which stage of technological development.
Maybe what we knew to do would seem so useless in just few more years....