Why Slower Computers Were Faster

In this video I discuss why computers were faster when they were slower, because with high end hardware, soy devs aren't going to do the low level work that used to be mandatory for developing applications.

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[AnalyticMinded]

Did you get those muscles by writing in C?

[censoredterminalautism]

The things that were done to make old games possible are pretty damn insane.

[ff-jtun]

Yes I need 5 GB of node modules on my static blog, what made you ask?

[ZenoDovahkiin]

This video plays in my head whenever a tiny 2D game takes up 3GB of storage because Unity.

[PeterPan-evdr]

"Software slows down faster than hardware speeds up, " called Wirth's law, and coined by Nicklaus Wirth, Swiss computer scientist who developed Pascal as well as other programming languages. In his 1995 article "A Plea for Lean Software"

[deltabravo]

It's nice to see some muscle in the IT community

[georgalex]

"Black Luke Smith complains about his pokemon emulation folder getting bigger".

[jopa]

The answer is: Electron did not exist.

[raphaelcardoso]

C is still taught in electrical engineering though. EE bois still keeping the flame alive programming for 1kb flash microcontrollers running on 8MHz

[ThatEntityGirl]

Actually Gold, Silver and Crystal had pretty much double the content of Red, Blue and Yellow. It had the entire world and all of the trainers and gyms of the first games thrown in as a part of the postgame in addition to its new stuff.

The devs of Gold, Silver and Crystal during development were having a lot of trouble with storage space and were unable to fit the base game on the cartridge, and after Satoru Iwata stepped in and helped them out the data compression was so good that they were able to fit in the entire world of the last game in addition to the base game, lol

[cybermiguelo]

As a geek myself and a pharmacist for profession, I really laughed at the Mental Outlaw explanation and people here ranting about languages, when they fail to see the bigger picture (which people working in other areas such as healthcare do see), which is: the human factor.

Companies want to have replaceable people and need things as standardized as possible so, at a moment notice, they can fire a coder and hire a new one without losing too much productivity. I know because the same happens at clinics and pharmacies with pharmacy technicians and even pharmacists.

When you factor the costs of having an extremely optimized code that takes time to develop (which is expensive) versus having a bloated app that can be written in practically no time at all, giving you an advantage over your competitor (in other fields than IT), you choose the bloated app with the "soycoder" because it is cheap and saves you money.

Bloated code also needs the least time in training a new guy to maintain it if the "soycoder" goes rogue and/or violates some bullshit NDA.

Heck, at the pharmacy where I used to work, they still use a DB and client software WRITTEN IN THE 90s IN VISUAL FOXPRO!!! It's slow, poorly (if anything) optimized, clunky, and only works in 32-bit mode. HOWEVER, its still used because the guy who maintains it still works at the company and now is too expensive to fire, and also because using a newer solution would require to re-train about 500 pharmacists and lose sales (something these pharmacy chain stores will NEVER do).

TL;DR: Code is not the issue. Time vs money & user-training vs money is.

[shawnsorbom]

I'm skeptical that the bloat comes from code though, at least in games. John Carmack once noted that the ENTIRE Doom 1 game could fit into a single texture on Doom 3. The main growth in games comes from assets.

[GabrielSantos-thww]

"Millennial rants about his pokemon games getting heavier".

[ItsAllAboutGuitar]

To back up what you said, I'm the ONLY person in my company that has ever written a program in assembly. I remember on the PS1 having to store fields in a Bit field to fit everything into save data. Now, "let's give them a 10 GB update because we don't care"

Imagine how powerful computers would be if old school guys were squeezing every last bit of performance out of these new machines.

[Dajan]

As a developer myself (who also likes low level stuff) i have to take some issue with whats said here.
Most performance heavy Software like Videogames and Server Applications are still written in c++ explicityl for the performance benefits and possibilities for optimization.
But size is by far not everything and not often of the most concern. For example if you are working on a huge project like a game engine it is very difficult to keep an overview over the thousands of files and classes in there. Developers may sacrifice some controll over memory management and use programming languages that simplify code so that it becomes more readable, extendable and maintainable. That is something very important because if your code base is huge you may forget how some things work when you revisit them to fix bugs or add features.
Optimized and low level code is extremely hard to read and understand. So it can slow down the development enormously if your code is obfuscated and hard to understand. And develompent time costs a lot of money.

So at some level of complexity you usually rather write high level code and let the compiler figure out the optimization by itself. Acutally trying to optimize your code better than a sophisticated modern compiler is very difficult. In most cases you choose a balance between readablity and performance by generally writing simple code and then optimizing at the performance critical locations afterwards.

Also another reason for more memory usage is performance increases. Many data structures are either optimal for performance i.e. reading/accessing data or inserting/deleting data or offer more space efficiency. Faster data structures and algorithms usually need some memory overhead to acomplish this benefit. On a modern system even a triple A videogame has more than enough ram to maybe rather use 30% more memory and in exchange achieve a significant performance increase. Nowadays the bottleneck is more on processing power than memory (ram and drive). So development style changed accordingly.

Also wich Language you use also depends on the application. There is no one style fits all solution.
Every language has its cases where its more usefull than the alternatives.

Generally i agree that some systems are getting really bloated nowadays like all that unnessecary crap thats on your phone or windows. But that doesnt mean every developer just doesnt give a shit anymore and doesnt know how to code.

[candlehawk]

"You've got soy devs who aren't taking the time -- they don't even touch C" That slayed me.

[mr]

I don't really think Pokemon got super bloated until X and Y. I mean look at Black and White, all the pokemon had full animations for the battle sprites with 649 unique Pokemon, and a much higher quality soundfont than Diamond and Pearl. Sword and Shield were just awful though, they were 10 GB with unnecessary repeating assets and less than 500 unique Pokemon in the game (and the 3D models were mostly lifted from the 3DS games).

Also you should look up the story of why Gold and Silver had the bonus Kanto region. The dev team was having trouble even fitting Johto onto the cartridge with all the new Pokemon, and Satoru Iwata actually came up with a compression algorithm that could work on the Gameboy Color and allow for significantly more content. Pretty much a masterpiece of gaming optimization.

[q]

I had a professor who spent his 80's and 90's optimizing assembly code generated by gcc as his job.

[batomow]

I used C as my language of choice during my computer graphics and compilers classes. Must say that while I did learn a lot and fell in love with the language, it was not good for the heart. I had to learn to code really fast to keep up with my peers and had to dedicate A LOT of my free time to really get things done. Do i regret it? Yes. Would I do it again? Definitely not. That year was really stressful, yet I continued because I tried to proof to myself I could do it. Barely managed a passing grade at the end. Machines and Software were created to make our lives easier, devs included, If its really about performance and optimization, you gotta look at the bigger picture, optimize your life, maybe instead of learning C, I could have used that time to hit the gym and get chad arms like mr outlaw.

[ZwelMunWint]

This happened to the music industry as well. A lot of music tech cooperates are becoming less innovative and focus on selling snake oil products, softwares and plugins for music producers who just want to start. At the end of the day, the scene is bloated as the result. People really like spoon feed products, services or programs rather than learning the basic fundamental and work with the limitation. Believe me, Limitation brings the most creativity. It’s the most beautiful thing, a person can do. It’s beyond art.