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Nora

@blacklight The machine on Voyager was purpose designed for one job only. Its hardware and software were designed together by experts for a single purpose, and it works wonderfully. A PC is a general purpose machine designed to do thousands of different tasks well. A PC can run a simulator of Voyager or other space probe, but Voyager can’t play Doom. @june

30 Jul 2023 at 15:34 | Wall-to-wall | Open on mas.to
3 comments
Shiri Bailem

@bumpus @june @blacklight there's alot more to it than that, and purpose built hardware doesn't affect this very much (purpose built software however is a major factor).

But also, there's years of cruft from programmers no longer being under pressure for resources. Very often today the memory usage of a program relates to the fact that it would take a lot of work to optimize it, and systems have more than enough resources to run it unoptimized without much issue...

30 Jul 2023 at 18:31 | Open on foggyminds.com
Fabio Manganiello

@bumpus @june I've dug on this aspect (abstractions vs. specializations in engineering) in this message social.platypush.tech/@blackli.

You are right, when you optimize you usually specialize and lose abstractions, which means losing the general-purpose aspect.

But the opposite is also true - create too many abstractions, and you start introducing more cognitive burden, besides the performance overhead.

I feel like there's a "sweet spot" for general-purpose software.

@bumpus @june I've dug on this aspect (abstractions vs. specializations in engineering) in this message social.platypush.tech/@blackli.

You are right, when you optimize you usually specialize and lose abstractions, which means losing the general-purpose aspect.

But the opposite is also true - create too many abstractions, and you start introducing more cognitive burden, besides the performance overhead.

30 Jul 2023 at 21:19 | Open on social.platypush.tech
Shiri Bailem

@blacklight @bumpus @june Absolutely agree!

That's why I tried to avoid value judgement terms in my commentary on it... I mean, I'm a python programmer (hobbyist), that right away puts me right in there with using more resources than I technically need for a project!

30 Jul 2023 at 21:24 | Open on foggyminds.com
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