Paul has it right. Machine capacity is dirt cheap these days and
possibly much cheaper than trying to find/fix at least some of the
inefficiencies in massive software systems. I think I've mentioned this
here before but I have vivid memories of it so I'll say it again. When
I was system test manager for OS/2 we had a single memory management
leak that ultimately consumed the work of 20 software engineers from
both Microsoft and IBM for a period of 6 weeks to find, fix and verify.
That's over two man-year's worth of work to fix one bug.
Since it was the operating system at fault there was no question of
whether it needed to be fixed despite the very large cost of time and
labor. Would I have invested that kind of time and labor to fix a
problem in PhotoShop that bothers Moose but has never been noticeable to
me... or maybe you? Maybe... but maybe not. Large software systems
typically ship with thousands of known bugs. That's because the bugs
are judged too inconsequential and/or too dangerous to fix ahead of a
deadline. Fixing a bug has the very real risk of regressing the code by
introducing a problem worse than the one you tried to fix. Fix it
ultimately, probably. Fix it tomorrow, maybe not.
I hope that the software development of today is better than I last knew
it some 20 years ago... but I suspect that any process quality
improvements have been offset by the much larger size and complexity of
today's systems and applications. (The OS/2 of 1993 was about 3 million
lines of code. I've heard [but don't know] that today's Windows systems
are more like 30 million lines of code)
Chuck Norcutt
On 4/4/2013 4:19 PM, Paul Braun wrote:
> In the old days, software had to be tight and efficient because computers
> had tiny amounts of ram, and with the stratospheric prices for upgrades,
> most customers weren't likely to add that extra 8 megabytes of RAM just to
> run your app.
>
> Nowadays, when I can get 64 GIGABYTES of RAM for right around $440,
> software architects figure that if the new version requires more ram to be
> useful, I'll just log into Newegg and order up another pair of SO-DIMMS.
>
> When I graduated from college (university for you "across the ponders") in
> 1984, RAM was $1330 per megabyte. Now, that is enough to stuff 64gigabytes
> into three separate computers.
>
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