Reminds me of Jonathan Blow's talk: [Software is in Decline]( ▶ this video ). I think one reason why software is slow because managers don't allocate time to improve performance unless it gets worse than "good enough". For me that meant taking time to improve performance without being told or telling anyone how much time I spent trying to improve performance. When I used to work on Android in a large company my favorite low hanging fruit was looking where people used `Cursor.getColumnIndex(String columnName)`. People would call it inside a loop for every row in the query result. This was a surprisingly large time sink according to the profiler. Some developers just don't know or care about performance. I depended on a system that had very large list of banned/blocked IP addresses. This list was stored as a giant array of hundreds of `BigInteger`s. Each time the function was called to determine if an IP address was banned it would convert hundreds of strings into an array of `BigInteger` and then loop through the array checking against each one.
in “Is Software Getting Worse?” · View on HN