[ravenide]

Here are some serious outstanding problems in software:

* Considering how fast modern computers are, software is so damn slow.

* Software frequently stops working. When it does, the process to diagnose the bug and fix it conclusively is not a straightforward one.

* Software is poorly understood. Most developers today work with other people’s abstractions. It’s rare to find a software system that someone can describe the inner workings of end to end.

* Software is excessively complex. To understand a codebase, you might have to crawl through ten layers of dependencies, imports, and scaffolding before finding code that actually does anything.

These are just some obvious ones off the top of my head. Does following the advice on this list make me any better at tackling any of these problems?

Could someone conceivably do none of the things on this list, and still be a very skilled developer who makes strong strides toward solving these problems?

[dragonwriter]

> These are just some obvious ones off the top of my head.

But they are all the same one (the last form is the clearest statement), restated in different ways or viewed through effects that the same source causes.

[Olreich]

I’d argue that there’s at least two problems: software is needlessly complex, and no one understands what the computer is doing.

You might say that second one is the same, but our model for what a processor is and what it’s doing and how fast it’s working hasn’t changed in at least 10 years. Graphics cards have gotten faster, but still have a similar operating model. If anything access to low level systems has gotten easier to understand and harness.

Because all of this stuff is still the same, you can usually take a look at any piece of software and make it faster by aligning the code to what the computer is good at. That could be done by increasing data locality and widening the processing pipe with SIMD. Caching and cheating the calculations are also often good since they essentially skip work that will go unnoticed. This will often increase the code complexity, but improve the software speed.

[ravenide]

You’re right.

[commandlinefan]

> Could someone conceivably do none of the things on this list

Conversely, you could do everything on this list, and still be a lousy programmer. Or not even a programmer at all.