If C= had produced an Amiga incompatible wonder computer would you have bought it?

[commodorejohn]

In 1993 I was a kid playing around with BASIC on a Mac IIcx - as long as the UI was as nice as System 7's I probably would never have known the difference

[commodorejohn]

They did release machines around that time frame that were incompatible with Amiga, PC clones including laptops.

Yeah, but the question was about an Amiga-incompatible system that was a step forward. Commodore's PC clones were basically just okay, nothing special even by PC standards.

[commodorejohn]

Who gives a damn?  Terabytes of HD space, gigabytes of RAM, gigabytes of video card RAM.

The hell with that. If you only view increasing hardware specs as an excuse for code to get sloppier, what the hell good is it? All you're doing is wasting what should be a mind-boggling bounty.

[commodorejohn]

Oh, and one other thing:

Mac OS 1.0 ran in 128k; the A1000 shipped with 256 (but needed 512mb for apps as a practicality).  Was MacOS 4x better than the A1000 then?

No. For starters, Mac OS up through System 6 didn't have even cooperative multitasking, let alone the Amiga's pre-emptive multitasking, and as for the memory requirements, even the Mac team knew that 128KB wasn't enough for practical use with more than one moderate-sized application and a document or two, which is why they designed the 128K Mac to be upgradable to 512KB, even though Jobs and Apple corporate made it difficult to get into in an attempt to force users to purchase a new "fat Mac" or pay for official upgrade service.

[commodorejohn]

Sorry dogg, telling me my Win* install takes up an appalling 20gb out of one of my two 2tb hard drives means diddly/squat to me.  That's a drop in the bucket.  That's so tiny I can't hear it rattling around in there.  It doesn't mean jack.

I'm really sorry that technology has scaled.  I too wish I was fucking around with a 5mb RLL hard drive the size of a four-slice toaster and a green fisheye Lear dumb terminal, all stuck together on an Ohio Scientific home-build.

See, I get the desire for more capacity and CPU horsepower. Really, I do. What I don't get is how you can understand that software used to be coded efficiently so as to run at all on far less powerful hardware, and yet think that not only is it acceptable that it's now sloppy and bloated, but it doesn't matter!? Yes, it's true that 20GB out of 2TB (or even a more common setup of 600GB) is a small percentage - it's still 8-12 times what a Windows XP install might take, and it damn well doesn't provide even five times the functionality.

This attitude of "oh, who cares, I have lots of space to blow" is reminiscent of someone who's just won the lottery and has no actual frame of reference for money in the amounts they now possess - even relatively small wastes can add up into large losses. Waste is waste and shoddiness is shoddiness, whether it amounts to a major problem or not. No amount of hardware capability is a sufficient excuse for sloppiness of that magnitude.

[commodorejohn]

Yeah, certainly there are practical considerations - it's just the notion of "oh, good coding and optimization mean absolutely nothing now that we have fast CPUs and lots of RAM" that irks me.

[commodorejohn]

Even the 1982 C64 had advantages like longer filenames over Win PC <94

...uh, long filenames are nice, but they hardly make up for everything else kludgy and terrible about the Commodore DOS filesystem. And I say that as someone who likes the C64.

Bloat has always been the ethos in the corporate industry since the 80s.....write your application to achieve its core function, if it's slow buy a better box to execute it on. Until machines stop getting more powerful each successive generation this is the most economical way to do it.

"Most economical," maybe, but that doesn't make it good.

[commodorejohn]

Frequently it does.  The application that works is more "good" than the application that doesn't work.  The application that exists genrerally works, while the application that doesn't exist does not.  Thus the application that has been written is more "good" than the one that hasn't been written.

You can say that the application isn't "good", but it is WAY more "Good" than if it didn't exist at all, which would be more likely if heavy optimization were the requirement.

Again, I'm not saying there aren't sufficient reasons to settle for sub-optimal code - yes, commercial software development takes time and money, and yes, it's more important to meet the parameters in a reasonable frame of time than to delay indefinitely in hopes of attaining perfection (this, for instance, is the reason people took to Linux and not GNU Hurd.)

But this idea that sub-optimal code is the ideal instead of something to be settled for, just because we now have hardware on which the difference is less noticeable, is something I will not accept. No way, nohow.

It is crap for us yes, but business is different and profit & revenue are the only concerns for corporate entities. Being unique is as good as it gets.

See, I'm not going to say that businesses shouldn't settle for what works for them as far as investment/return conisderations go. But I do not understand the now-prevailing notion that corporate financial considerations are the true measure of goodness.

Sure, it works for a business, because software to a business is either a tool to aid in the operation of the business, or a product to be created and distributed by the business. But when did that become the goal for ALL programmers!? Why should our tastes and our ideals be defined by the considerations of some non-existent company that we aren't a part of?