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February 3, 2005
Smart software
In the beginning CPUs were slow, memories were measured in bits and hard drives were the size of a family car. 640K was Nirvana, FPUs were things for the spoiled and supercomputers were work of genius. But above all, in the beginning programmers were smart.
Nowadays, computers are mini, 400GB fits in a pocket and some hard drives are the size of a matchbox. And as everything got smaller, mini and tiny, unfortunately the same thing happened to the intelligence of the programmers. Which is why I think smart and interesting tweaks are things of the past in today's programming world. For example, if you want to make a list in memory, you have a template. If you need to play heavy tricks with strings, there's a template. If you want to code a high precision arithmetic app, yes, you've guessed, there is definitively a template, library or module somewhere.
In this world of templates, libraries and already-written code, it's very rare that I see some wits at work. With small and notable exceptions, for instance, GMail.
Yesterday, a friend of mine sent me an e-mail with 5 images. When I was about to go and save each and every image one by one, I've noticed the following text:
"5 attachments — [Download all attachments]"
Since GMail is a webmail system, I wondered how clicking "Download all attachments" would actually result into saving all attachments to disk - in just one step?
Apparently, somebody at Google hasn't lost all those wits. The server-side components takes all the attached files, packs them with ZIP (!) and presents you with an archive for download. Which can you save on disk in one step.
Smart.
Posted by Costin Raiu at February 3, 2005 12:02 PM