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112 points leoncaet | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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kragen ◴[] No.44538644[source]
I may be the only one who thought this, but this doesn't seem to be related to the fondly remembered Better Software Magazine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Software_Magazine

It seems to be socially associated with the Handmade Hero and Jon Blow Jai crowd, which is not so much concerned that their software might be buggy as that it might be lame. They're more concerned about user experience and efficiency than they are about correctness.

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swesour ◴[] No.44538753[source]
> which is not so much concerned that their software might be buggy as that it might be lame

This is not at _all_ my interpretation of Casey and JBlow's views. How did you arrive at this conclusion?

> They're more concerned about user experience and efficiency than they are about correctness.

They're definitely very concerned about efficiency, but user experience? Are you referring to DevX? They definitely don't prize any kind of UX above correctness.

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mustache_kimono ◴[] No.44539162{3}[source]
> This is not at _all_ my interpretation of Casey and JBlow's views.

IMHO this group's canonical lament was expressed by Mike Acton in his "Data-Oriented Design and C++" talk, where he asks: "...Then why does it take Word 2 seconds to start up?!"[0]. See also Muratori's bug reports which seem similar[1].

I think it is important to note, as the parent comment alludes, that these performance problems are real problems, but they are usually not correctness problems (for the counterpoint, see certain real time systems). To listen to Blow, who is actually developing a new programming language, it seems his issue with C++ is mostly about how it slows down his development speed, that is -- C++ compilers aren't fast enough, not the "correctness" of his software [2].

Blow has framed these same performance problems as problems in software "quality", but this term seems share the same misunderstanding as "correctness". And therefore seems to me like another equivocation.

Software quality, to me, is dependent on the domain. Blow, et. al, never discuss this fact. Their argument is more like -- what if all programmers were like John Carmack and Michael Abrash? Instead of recognizing software is an economic activity and certain marginal performance gains are often left on the table, because most programmers can't be John Carmack and Michael Abrash all the time.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc [1]: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362 [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkdpLSXUXHY

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1. meheleventyone ◴[] No.44539827{4}[source]
> Their argument is more like -- what if all programmers were like John Carmack and Michael Abrash? Instead of recognizing software is an economic activity and certain marginal performance gains are often left on the table, because most programmers can't be John Carmack and Michael Abrash all the time.

At least for Casey his case is less that everyone should be Carmack or Abrash but that programmers often through their poor design choices prematurely pessimise their code when they don’t need too.