First of all I would like to say I appreciate your hard work. I realize coding is your art and X-Plane is your master piece, and you are very fine artist. On a more hardware related note I stumbled upon a web site that compares CPU's and Graphics Cards using a standardized downloadable program that puts the computer through a battery of tests. The program then uploads the test results to a data base where you can compare your computers hardware to those of the data base in a nice easy to read graphical format. The data base and graphical comparisons are free to everyone to look at even if you don't test your computer. Here is the link: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/

What I had in mind was the 'programmers' who write universally horrid code. I don't even know how to quantify it, but you see things like terrible algorithms if not brute force to the max; odd concepts that align with a few bits of code each, albeit hardly; no elegance at all; just overall low quality. It makes me feel like I've witnessed one of the more probable 'working' results of monkeys with compilers. Hmmm, that might not even be far from the truth. Maybe we are all monkeys. 🙂

Second Anon: right – the efficiency of the code might decrease with increased hardware, but often we can live with this. I believe the cost of writing software is worse than linear to its complexity – that is, writing a big program isn't just harder than writing a small program, it's _much_ harder…the ability to write at a higher level of abstraction (which also tends to soak up CPU cycles) is necessary to write a program big enough to fully exploit that new hardware. Or something like that.

I'm not saying the computer experience hasn't improved over the decades. But if you ever wonder why things just aren't as fast today as you had imagined when hardware was a few orders of magnitude slower, this is it. Of course, it can be attributed to all sorts of factors, not just inefficiency (not that a lot of today's software *can't* be a whole lot more efficient without killing functionality). Still, when code naturally runs faster, it will usually get slower one way or another.

Same deal with robustness. You might think that after all this time, people will have learned to write robust code. But with time to learn and new technological help, even deceptively simple software still crashes, has bugs, and is vulnerable to exploits. If this changes, it's mostly due to market pressure, not some new technological improvement or more programmers becoming wise all of a sudden.

People don't care about making things 'perfect' in some sense. They care about making things tolerable.

Right.