It's a bit depressing that she has to go to such lengths in her introduction to justify the goal of lightweight and fast code.
I started learning to code on a 25MHz 386, with no hardware floating point, clunky disk drives, and a dialup modem. Having to wait for anything to happen on a modern system, or suffer with any kind of noticeable interactive latency, is just flat-out unacceptable to me. Our machines are gods, yet our terrible bloated software makes them cry.
I started with a 0.9 MHz system with 64.5 kB of RAM. And plenty of people have started with even less.
By the time we were at 386s, code bloat was already pretty bad.
Bad energy wasting performance is even worse than bloat. I'm horrified how much electrical energy bad code costs. We're already talking about a bunch of nuclear powerplants' output wasted!
Author here. We learned this a couple weeks ago when I blogged about logging C functions. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31443198#31444751 I've been in contact with several employees trying to get it resolved. One of our regular contributors is even a staff security engineer at Amazon and he's just as confused about what's happening as the rest of us. There's a real lack of transparency so far on the part of Amazon and there's no official channels for appealing these sort of black box decisions. It's a real shame, since this isn't just my blog, but it also represents all the people who've been working hard to contribute. If we've been blacklisted by a company like Amazon then I'd like to at least know what's wrong and what steps I can take to address the situation.
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I started learning to code on a 25MHz 386, with no hardware floating point, clunky disk drives, and a dialup modem. Having to wait for anything to happen on a modern system, or suffer with any kind of noticeable interactive latency, is just flat-out unacceptable to me. Our machines are gods, yet our terrible bloated software makes them cry.
By the time we were at 386s, code bloat was already pretty bad.
Bad energy wasting performance is even worse than bloat. I'm horrified how much electrical energy bad code costs. We're already talking about a bunch of nuclear powerplants' output wasted!