zlacker

People have been saying this literally since the release of the pentium and probably earlier. From where I'm sitting software is millions of times better today than it was in the 90s when I first started hearing people saying this(usually complaining about developers using C++ instead of assembly).

Even just on the iphone the improvements in software have been dramatic over the past 10 years. Go install one of the early versions of ios on the simulator some time to see how far we've come.

>>sanswo+(OP)
> From where I'm sitting software is millions of times better today than it was in the 90s

I feel compelled to bring up this tweet from John Carmack I just saw a few hours ago. The most popular editor on the planet feels laggier than stuff Borland made in the 90s, on hardware probably a thousand times as fast. I don't know how anyone can say software is great with a straight face.

We have supercomputers in our pockets and on the slightly aged phone my dad refuses to upgrade from four years ago many apps lag. They display like 5 widgets or 20 rows of items at any given time

https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1709651442762481877?s=20

>>Barrin+I2
The ratio of users who give a shit about 100ms of input lag on a 4 year old phone is tiny compared to devs who cared about typing lag 20 years ago

>>Barrin+I2
Turbo C++ was my first IDE(a birthday present when I was a kid) and I will always be grateful of it for triggering my love of programming but to say that is even in the same category as a modern IDE is a huge stretch. Of course modern stuff is laggier for most IDE's as it's doing real time analysis on your code as you type. If you want to compare it with a Borland IDE from the 90s open up notepad and start typing.

>>sanswo+(OP)
> From where I'm sitting software is millions of times better today than it was in the 90s when I first started hearing people saying this.

Define better. I enjoyed computers more in the 80s. There was less bureaucracy. Cubase on the Atari ST never crashed. The modern C++ one does crash, often.

>>drchic+54
It isn't. The users are just conditioned to shut up. Technology universally sucks, but it's magic, and it's all a supplier-driven market with high natural barriers to entry - meaning vendors don't give a flying fuck about what the users think, the users are to buy what they're given and be happy about it - so everyone just accepts it's how it's supposed to be, and adjusts their lives to work around tech being shit.

>>grumpy+p8
Better features, better functionality.

Much like with old IDEs old DAWs did a lot less. If you truely prefer it why aren't you still running Cubase on an old Atari or emulator?

Besides that there is the whole rose tinted glasses thing. My early experiences getting FreeBSD and Slackware running on my computers, and setting up X for example were something I'd never trade and taught me a lot about debugging systems, configs, etc. But that whole process was objectively worse than today.

>>sanswo+Ud
both can be true. software has become objectively more abominable each passing year. spyware is being normalized, locking down and taking away control from users is being spoonfed to hipster users as "opinionated" and "curated". Have you taken a look at the chromium codebase lately? 1.5GB of compressed (lzma) "code". W T F. Just look 10-15 years ago and look at khtml, look at webkit a few years after the fork, then look at this shit? we still ordered crap from amazon back then. We still had forms to submit to HN or similar. Sure, we didnt have thin webgl wrappers, webusb, webmidi, web-wipe-my-ass updates to our japanese toilets. The amount of direct crap being put into almost everything is beyond measure

>>redeem+1h
All those things you're complaining about existed in the past in the form of applets, flash scripts, and activex. They were way worse than a bunch of web* standards.

As for curated/opinionated, most people don't want to be power users. Most people never did it was just in the 90s you had little choice. If you want to be a power user today the options are still there.

>>sanswo+(OP)
I don't know, Microsoft Word 2.0 started up on a high-end machine of its time faster than Google Docs with its stupid progress bars.

My Tesla phone key takes 15+ seconds to connect bluetooth and unlock the car, making me look like a goddamn idiot while I keep yanking the car handle while bystanders stare at me as if I'm a car thief.

This stuff should take <0.01s in 2023 by Moore's Law. Computers should work imperceptibly fast by now for the same high-level tasks.

>>sanswo+(OP)
Sure ARM based Mac laptops are great. But x86 laptops are still just as loud, hot with horrible battery life as they always have been.

>>Barrin+I2
In the meanwhile, I know plenty of my friends happily daily driving an iphone 8, a 6 years old device.

>>dheera+Jn
Moore’s law has never been about speed - and serial speed has been on a very slow increase rate year-after-year for more than a decade now. The current Microsoft Word can do a million times more things than 2.0.

>>dheera+Jn
Why are you using Google Docs instead of Word 2.0 then?

>>sanswo+j4
Borland IDEs were definitly better than Notepad.

>>pjmlp+lY
The editor did nothing more than notepad does today and the IDE at least back when I was using it was basically just a compiler, debugger with basic inspection window and stepping and a make system. It wasn't doing realtime formatting of your code, inspection for errors, referencing to other parts of code, autocompletion, syntax highlighting, etc.

>>sanswo+Vi
applets were largely unused and flash was mostly used for ads, neither of which were even remotely as huge and gross as the chromium codebase.

nowadays you have many "desktop" applications bundling their own special build of chrome just because developers are so lazy(and I'd say many severely lacking critical judgement) they feel like taking their webapp and deploying as a "desktop" application.

The situation is infinitely much worse than it was in 1995.

>>scarfa+Ex
Hyperbole much?

2003 x86 laptop: 1-2h battery life, fan ~always on, annoying tonal fan noise

2023 x86 laptop: 6-10h battery life, fan off in idle, some kind of wide spectrum whooshing sound when on

>>sanswo+T01
Stuck in MS-DOS?

As someone that used all their products from MS-DOS, through Windows 3.x days up to switching to Visual C++ 6.0, I clearly remeber code completion, syntax highlighting and macros, three features that Notepad isn't capable of.

As easily proven, by reading the manuals available in Bitsavers.

>>pjmlp+H31
Yeah looks like you're right about at least the syntax highlighting and macros, I can't find any reference to Borland doing code completion back then and what I did find was people from much later complaining that it'd take up to 5 seconds to return suggestions, I used it around 4.5 and really don't remember any of those features though. I guess it was almost 30 years ago now though and I was mostly just interested in making the asteroids do weird things.

So replace Notepad with Notepad++ in my previous comments. There are definitely fast editors that do the same thing as Borland editors did back then the ones like VSC do a whole lot more and support a whole lot more.

>>ahartm+i21
You realize how bad 6 hour battery life is right compared to the MacBook Air?

And my work Microsoft Surface laptop fan never shuts off.

>>sanswo+L61
Besides moving goalposts, Notepad++ still isn't on the same league as Borland's IDEs.

>>scarfa+081
And my work x86 Thinkpad fan rarely spins up and when it does it's way quieter than my Intel MBP ever was. Also gets 8 hours battery life web browsing which is good enough.

It's almost like there's a spectrum of PCs.

>>goosed+rj1
I never said that x86 MacBooks didn’t suck.

My former work 16 inch MacBook Pro could easily make it through a day and half of decently heavy work and conference calls doing presentations over Chime (how do you say where you worked without saying where you worked) on battery when on site at a customer. Some of their team couldn’t make it.

My personal MacBook Air (M2) can make it 16+ hours with a relative light workload and there is no fan.

Why would I ever in 2023 still put up with a heavy, loud, low battery life laptop when I could get an M1 Air for less than $1000?

>>sanswo+(OP)
You reminded me the 90's joke: "What is Windows? An 386 emulator for Pentium".

>>pjmlp+H31
Turbo Pascal 7 did syntax highlighting, as well as source-level debugging. That was on top of nice-to-have features like auto-indenting.

It was a DOS, Turbo Vision application.

>>scarfa+Iw1
My M1 Macbook Air was lucky to make it 6 hours with Docker running in the background. If I was editing text I could get maybe 10-12 hours. For my money, there are lots of machines that would run cooler and more efficiently.

> Why would I ever in 2023 still put up with a heavy, loud, low battery life laptop when I could get an M1 Air for less than $1000?

Because your workload isn't compatible with MacOS, and Apple makes no effort to remedy it at a software-level? Docker should not be more energy efficient on Windows than it is on Mac... and that's really just the tip of the incompatibility iceberg. Unless your workload is explicitly compatible with ARM, it probably Just Works better on x86.

>>smolde+Dx5
So how long does you Windows laptop battery last when running Docker? How loud do the fans get?

>>scarfa+2J5
It hovered around 40c, about the same as my Macbook Air. Fans kicked on at 45c, so idling was silent (but working wasn't).

The real killer-app for me was just switching to Linux as my base OS. I can leave containers idling while watching YouTube at a cool 27c internally. I'm using a 6-7 year old T460s, but honestly I feel like I could get away with even weaker hardware if I wanted. A Macbook Air running Linux might be a candidate if I didn't need to wait for basic functionality to get reverse-engineered. As-is though, you can count me among the people who doesn't quite need an upgrade yet.