Programmer Humor

Ironically the management that does have a clue often is hamstrung somewhere up the chain.

I've said this on reddit before, but once for a joke I tried to make a windows program to play doot.wav during October at random, and tried programming it on Linux.

Sinds playing audio and working with the system tray was tricky, I ended up with electron.

So yeah, an atrocious 120 mb application to play a 6kb wav file with a Math.random(). I don't remember the memory consumption, but it was probably just as gross.

Mostly the latter. We don't do any optimizations on our product whatsoever. Most important thing is to say yes to all the customers and add every single feature they want. Every sprint is spent adding and adding and adding to the code as much as we can and as quickly as we can. Not a single second is allotted to any discussion about performance or efficiency. Maybe when something breaks, but otherwise we keep piling on more crap at full speed non-stop. I have repeatedly been told "the fast way is the right way" followed by laughter. I was told to "merge this now" on multiple occasions even when I knew that the code was shit, and told the team as much. I am expected to write code now and think about it later.

As you can expect, the codebase is a bloated nightmare. Slow as shit, bugs galore, ugly inconsistent UI, ENORMOUS memory use, waaaaaay too frequent DB access with a shit ton of duplicate requests that are each rather inefficient themselves. It is a rather complex piece of lab management software, but not so complex that it should be struggling to run on dedicated servers with 8 gigs of RAM. Yet it does.

Much the latter.

Plus everything better work perfecly out of the box on any hardware, and there is a lot of different hardware. Compatibility layers are often built into the package.

Java, for instance, recommenda that you package the whole (albeit slimmed down) JVM inside the package for the target platform, rather than relying on the java runtime installed already.

The users arent expected to know any of that anymore.

Generally maybe but for apps specifically, it's the default choice of IDE, Android Studio, bundling tons of libraries for added functionality bound to Play Services.

Which would probably be illegal in EU now, if any judge had the tech see-through for it.

But if your tool chain is worth anything the size of each binary shouldn't be bigger. To oversimplify things a bit: it's just #ifdefs and a proper tool chain.

In the web development world on the other hand everything was always awful. Every nodejs package has half the world as dependencies...

You know we’ve reached peak bloat and stupidity when JavaScript web apps have a compilation step, and I don’t mean JIT.

I think the epic songs and 4K textures are missing in my MS Office.

Textures and songs are not a thing on most apps right? For android, using Kotlin has created much bigger appsize than old java

Backed devs: sweats

400mb iphone banking app entered the chat

Less triangles and smaller textures. Crt monitors had less resolution and practically built-in anti-aliasing so they could get away with (and had to) "worse" assets.

Also since ssd-s have become mainstream unity uses less compression so it would load relatively faster.

Basically because monitors got better, standards got higher, competition got fiercer, storage got bigger and faster, etc.

And it's not like there weren't shitty games before, just everybody forgot about them.

I like how the game Banished is made. From a requirenments/looks ratio it is IMO great. One guy made it. Ghosts of Tsushima also looks amazing and is great from a techical perspective, but it is heavy.

Smaller textures, more assets, and worse audio mainly. Textures used to be like 512 for hero props. Now even random objects you see a few times get a texture 16 times larger. And they get up to 4 of those for each object/group of objects. Thanks to pbr and normals and whatever other masks and lightmaps may be required.

Im sure there are more reasons for size bloat but this is from us artists at least.