[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How would software look if hardware had stop...
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       Ask HN: How would software look if hardware had stopped improving
       long ago?
        
       Progress in hardware allows software to build computationally
       costly abstractions to make devs more productive (for better or
       worse). While some use-cases definitely required improvements (e.g.
       deep learning became a thing thanks to powerful hardware), it is
       not clear that all software is better now that "RAM/CPU is cheap".
       For instance, IRC predates the World Wide Web, but desktop apps
       like Slack/Discord (that get shipped with a whole browser with
       ElectronJS) solve the exact same problem. Many websites are
       excessively heavy, "because they can", I guess mostly to "look
       better", and maybe to some extent because of ads/trackers. Modern
       developer tools require to download half the Internet regularly
       (e.g. node projects often come with 30 000 dependencies, apps get
       shipped with a whole rootfs in containers, or with an embedded
       chromium browser, etc). There is a ton of overhead everywhere,
       sometimes just because we can, sometimes because it's faster to
       market.  So I was wondering: how do you think software would look
       today if hardware had stopped improving, say 10 or 20 years ago?
       Surely we would have end-to-end messaging apps and social networks,
       but maybe video-on-demand (e.g. Netflix) would be more limited, and
       we would not have TikTok? Maybe we would not need 5G to connect our
       fridges to our shoes? We would not have cryptocurrencies or NFTs.
       But that does not mean we would have stopped developing software.
       Or maybe said differently: what are "useless/cosmetic" improvements
       that happened in the last 10 or 20 years in software, and what are
       "real" ones?
        
       Author : palata
       Score  : 5 points
       Date   : 2022-10-24 22:39 UTC (22 minutes ago)
        
       | conductr wrote:
       | I think it looks the same and just becomes less profitable.
       | Design trends propagate slower because iteration is slower.
       | 
       | Most AI/high powered stuff has not really added much value to the
       | average end users so they wouldn't have missed it. It would be a
       | toy for geeks which is kind of what it is now.
        
       | Yaa101 wrote:
       | We would have most of what is now, as most of what we have now as
       | concepts was programmed long ago.
       | 
       | Things would have been leaner, to the point and with less force
       | on the CPU.
       | 
       | There are some good things better possible due to more powerful
       | CPU, for instance virtual machines, even though that concept is
       | also a old one originating from IBM mainframes, as are relational
       | databases and sql.
       | 
       | Also programming languages became better and have better and more
       | complete stdlibs.
       | 
       | I guess most contemporary user software we have today are slow,
       | ugly and even irrelevant variants of better older versions.
       | 
       | Developer software does somewhat better as it does not need
       | pretty pictures.
        
       | david927 wrote:
       | I think you've said it all here. No substantial improvements and,
       | if anything, it has set us back by allowing for even more
       | gluttonous behavior.
        
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       (page generated 2022-10-24 23:02 UTC)