This is a simplification of bloat's causes, but it is something I have observed during my career as a programmer.
Bloat is not a function of actual code complexity or ignorance of resource usage.it is caused by bad management and time pressure. In a lot of modern software projects the mentality is to "always create" or "always move forward" This leads to a culture where code review and rewrites are deemed to be bad because it does not look or feel productive. So, what you end up with is a culter that assumes everything is an error of omission. That is, if something breaks, you write more code to fix it. You never fix the underlying problem, you only keep adding to it to fix the problem by hacks and workaround. This would be sort of like saying "My car is making a funny noise, can I add a part to the engine to make it stop?" In terms of algorithmic complexity, even something like a word processor doesn't do a lot in that arena. What it does do is operate with the operating system. The operating system had bugs that were worked around by adding code to it, and so you have to work around those problems that creates for your program in addition to the problems that you create yourself. So the bloat of the OS causes you to bloat your product, which causes your product to be buggier, which makes you bloat it more.... It's a vicious cycle. It stems from laziness (in that it is always easier to add than to analyze code), bad management (if they aren't writing new code, I'll fire them), and too much time pressure (code faster! the deadline is approaching). There are other facets to the problem, with lots of studies talking about it. Still, in my own observation the three things I mention above are really what causes bloat. Ironic that 2 of the 3 aren't even committed by people that write the code. -Bob On Wed, 6 Oct 2004 20:11:58 -0400, Byron Q. Desnoyers Winmill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, Oct 06, 2004 at 06:37:20PM -0500, Keith wrote: > > I would guess that it is economics. As the price of space and speed go > > down, and the price of efficiency (coding time) remains constant or > > goes up, it's cheaper to put bloatware on bigger faster machines. > > Sorry, I wasn't refering to the business/programming culture. I'm > more than aware of the excuses for not optimising for space or > speed. I even saw one book which said not to do it at all, even > if your program was unbearably slow, because you are designing for > the hardware of tomorrow. Or whatever. > > More to the point is this: my meager programming background has > exposed me to the efficiency of algorithms, with respect to speed. > That is to say O(n), O(n^2), etc. stuff. Yet I rarely hear about > space efficiency (either code or data). In fact, I never hear > about it beyond mention of the memory hierarchy (registers, cache, > RAM, disk, and whatever I missed in between). When you think about > it, it is kind of strange because memory capacity has been growing > at roughly the same rate as processor speeds, or maybe even more > slowly. I suppose this is because you rarely create much more data > when you iterate something (you may increase the amount of data by > n^2, but almost never more). > > If all programmers are given the same, limited, understanding, you > would think they are (on average) the same throughout time. Yes, > programmers of old had to be more conscious of memory usage (RAM > and permenant storage). On the other hand, I would think that that > would only change memory usage by a small factory. Maybe a factor > of 2 or 4. Small, just like optimising code without considering > the algorithm would produce small increases in performance. Yet > I get the impression that the bloat is on the order of a factor of > 10 or 100, even after you strip out the resources (because improved > image/sound quality requires more storage). > > Byron. > > > > -- > System6 is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... > > 123Inkjets.com <http://lowendmac.com/ad/123inkjets.html> > > Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> > > System 6 Heaven <http://www.euronet.nl/users/mvdk/system_6_heaven.html> > > System6 info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/system6.html> > --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; > Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/system6%40mail.maclaunch.com/> > > Using a Mac? 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