HMN admin, Handmade Math contributor, high school robotics mentor/enthusiast, web developer, etc.
Guntha
have you ever needed to work on several projects at the same time?
Guntha
try comparing the results of the feature "Find all references" on C# code, and then on C/C++ code
Guntha
You're talking about the deterioration of software as if it's a natural process, like an old car whose pieces get more and more rusty with time.
Arnon
But software doesn't deteriorate if you just keep using it without change.
Guntha
I don't understand how you came to think that open-source software is less a victim of the obsolescence you're describing?
Arnon
To some extent, open source software suffers much less from this.
Guntha
"Adult supervision" is also not letting junior developers get in charge of a new product or of the architecture of the current product.
Guntha
If you have several conflicting ideas, do them all and measure which one runs the fastest for your current needs.
Maths Honours student and amateur type theorist trying to live a little more low level
It's pretty obvious why Microsoft cares little about the load-time of VS. Their main clientell tend to just have the thing open all the time. They don't open it many times per-hour, just for debugging. It's a heavy-duty IDE, not a text editor. So that workflow is just not on their radar as something to be concearned about - at all.
In a large organisation, there will tend to be some very small percentage of people who contribute the vast majority of the benefits to the product/company, on one end of the spectrum, and on the other, it's typical to have a different small precentage of the people who cause most of the damage to the product/company. Your role, as a leader, is to identify the few people who cause most of the damage, and somehow neutralize their ability to do so. At the same time, identify the few people who contribute most of the value, and empower their ability to do so.
notnullnotvoid
Blender is WAY more complex than VS and has WAY more functionality, and is also intended to be kept open for long session, but it starts up in 2 seconds. It's perfectly possible and reasonable for a piece of software to be very complex without being "heavyweight". Blender has also been around for 26 years (a year longer then VS!), is accumulating new features constantly, is very much in the multifunctional "everything to everyone" camp, and yet still clearly improves with every version.
notnullnotvoid
there's a chicken-and-egg problem regarding startup time (and performance in general) that you're not accounting for. Is the software slow to start because people keep it open for long sessions, or do people keep it open for long sessions because it's slow to start?