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From: ssh@esl.UUCP (Sam)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc,comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: Software Technology is NOT Primitive
Message-ID: <516@esl.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 1-Nov-87 13:57:13 EST
Article-I.D.: esl.516
Posted: Sun Nov  1 13:57:13 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 5-Nov-87 20:58:15 EST
References: <3405@ece-csc.UUCP> <638@its63b.ed.ac.uk>
Reply-To: ssh@esl.UUCP (Sam)
Distribution: comp
Organization: ESL Inc.
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Xref: mnetor comp.lang.misc:849 comp.software-eng:53


Let's look at this cost issue.  Hardware gets faster and cheaper by
orders of magnitude.  Software productivity cannot keep up; any
improvements are measured in percentages, not in orders of magnitude.
Therefore we hear the argument "let hardware do the job... it's not
worth it to burn the money to improve the hardware for code or
performance...".

I consider this socially irresponsible.  Rather than company XYZ
paying the extra $YYY to properly structure the code, they rely on the
ZZZ thousands of consumers to pay extra for disk storage, power, time,
etc. to store, feed, and wait for this software.  This is an order of
magnitude not taken into account in rebuttals to the original
observation.

Do customers understand why processors with supposedly 10-30 times
more power as their old machine have no more than incremental
improvements in functionality and performance, yet take roughly 10
times the disk storage?  (Yes, I and others *can* cite examples of
this).

Let's reserve the productivity / portability argument for those few of
a kind cases such as custom-designed software (eg. military /
government contracts), but let's not get carried away by excusing the
laziness of the commercial software market.

Granted there's a middle ground; it's not so slanted in favor of
software sloth.
					-- Sam Hahn