We could make them faster, probably by orders of magnitude. At the very least, there are optimization opportunities in almost any modern app. And exponentially larger without a corresponding increase in value. Most developers know better than to say things like “it’s a smartphone OS, how hard can it be?” or “my spreadsheet app in the 90s was 10 kilobytes, how come Factorio is a full gigabyte?” If you weren’t there when it was built, you can’t reliably estimate all the hard knocks and complexity that went into it.īut that doesn’t mean there’s no room for objective criticism. The aforementioned posts on this subject come across as about 80% fair and reasonable criticism, 20% out-of-touch grumbling. DOOM, which came out in 1996, can run on a pregnancy test and a hundred other unexpected devices meanwhile, chat apps in 2022 use half a gigabyte of RAM (or more) while running in the background and sometimes lock up completely, even on high-end hardware. Among people who write about software development, there’s a growing consensus that our apps are getting larger, slower, and more broken, in an age when hardware should enable us to write apps that are faster, smaller, and more robust than ever.
It called to mind Maciej Cegłowski’s post “ The Website Obesity Crisis” and several others in the same vein.
I recently stumbled upon “ Software disenchantment,” a post by Nikita Prokopov.
