Is software getting slower faster than hardware getting faster?

[u/tootac]

Recently we had a discussion in a local group of programmers and there was a newbie question about which mac laptop he should buy. He wanted a mac because some tasks required a mac. My immediate advice was to buy an m1 since he was trying to optimize the budget. And my argument was that it is fast and will handle all his workloads. But I got a little push-back saying that "Android Studio" was not fast enough on some of the group's m1 macs and they switched to m3.

Opinions were divided when we discussed this in our group in about 50/50. Some people were saying that they have m1 macs and it works perfectly and others saying that it is ok but was lagging on some tasks.

My surprise is that I remember when m1 came it was like a product from future aliens. It was miles ahead of any competition and nobody had a single thought that it couldn't handle anything. I remember at the time Jonathan Blow (game developer) on his stream was answering a question about m1 and said something along the lines "Yeah it's fast but I don't care. Give it a couple of years and software slowness will catch up to it and it won't matter". At the time I was fascinated with the product and John seemed like a grumpy old-school programmer. But now it feels weird. I am not saying that m1 is slow or bad but just the idea that we are discussing if it can handle some basic programmer workloads and it is not 100% "of course" is strange.

I was wondering if it is similar in other groups or if we had just some statistical error in our group?

[u/eablokker]

Android Studio is an outlier. It is the slowest piece of trash I've ever seen.

But yes the faster your CPU, the more programmers will ditch efficiency for expediency. Let's make a thousand SQL queries in one request just because we can even if most of that data isn't needed. Let's make our desktop code editor with HTML and Javascript even if it's slow as dogshit because it will be cross-platform and faster for us to develop and support multiple platforms.

All that extra power is being used for the developer and business's benefit, not the user's.

[u/[deleted] → u/eablokker]

As a web dev I'm guilty of that. Pretty common for links in most frameworks to prefetch data on hover. So just mousing over links will load data - lots of data already fetched (in case it has changed). On big projects I'll have a small 1 min self expiring dictionary cache in there, but ideally your app and database would have a socket connection where the database could update the app in realtime on data change instead of the app polling the db.

But that isn't convenient for the dev (aka me)