I don’t believe that’s the reason. I think it’s project management priorities.
It’s possible to write efficient code to this day, examples of very complicated software implemented that way are triple-A videogames. However, it’s relatively hard (and therefore expensive) on quite a few levels. Performance targets should be accounted in functional specs, all developers should be aware of these targets, software must be specifically designed for performance, people (or better yet, robots) should continuously profile software, project management should prioritize performance-related issues and bugs.
And another thing. The hardware performance progress between 1975 and 2005 was exponential, driven by rapid advancements in photolithography. In these decades, we observed quite a few times that for many software products it’s often a better strategy to ship sooner relying on hardware progress to “fix” the performance, compared to spending time and money on software optimizations. The hardware performance progress slowed down substantially around 2010. Still, we have a generation of people in all positions over the industry who learned their experience in these decades of exponential explosion of compute power.
It’s possible to write efficient code to this day, examples of very complicated software implemented that way are triple-A videogames. However, it’s relatively hard (and therefore expensive) on quite a few levels. Performance targets should be accounted in functional specs, all developers should be aware of these targets, software must be specifically designed for performance, people (or better yet, robots) should continuously profile software, project management should prioritize performance-related issues and bugs.
And another thing. The hardware performance progress between 1975 and 2005 was exponential, driven by rapid advancements in photolithography. In these decades, we observed quite a few times that for many software products it’s often a better strategy to ship sooner relying on hardware progress to “fix” the performance, compared to spending time and money on software optimizations. The hardware performance progress slowed down substantially around 2010. Still, we have a generation of people in all positions over the industry who learned their experience in these decades of exponential explosion of compute power.