software

[John Kawakami]

...
>Since there are quite a few hardware and software experts on this 
list, I'm wondering what you all think. Is software quality improving 
vastly? And is the actual performance of computers - their output, 
whatever that is - really increasing at the kind of speed suggested 
by the price indexes (or, even more extravagantly, by Moore's law)? 
Or is a lot of the speed and power increase just taken up by bells 
and whistles?
>Doug

I'd say that the overall number of bugs/lines of code is decreasing, 
but there are a lot more lines.

A lot of the speed increases are consumed by ever larger data 
structures.  The more flexibility you allow in your data, the faster 
it is to code your program, but the slower the program is to run. 
There's also the bells and whistles.  Most of these don't necessarily 
slow down the systems, but a few require that they be run continually 
or are used constantly, and can severely slow down the software.

The reason for this featurism is marketing.

Of course, most software written is *not* off the shelf, but cusstom 
code for special purposes.  I imagine that faster PCs have meant that 
it's a lot cheaper to do fairly large data processing.

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John Kawakami
work (10am - 7 or 8) 818-385-2048
home (9 pm - 1 am) 818-543-0864
johnk at cyberjava.com, johnk at firstlook.com