I have become convinced that words like “lightweight” and “fast” have lost all meaning in software circles. You’ll get two projects describing themselves in sim

I have become convinced that words like “lightweight” and “fast” have lost all meaning in software circles. You’ll get two projects describing themselves in similar terms because they’re comparing themselves to wildly different things. (For example: Hexo and Zola both have a heading on their front pages titled “blazing fast”, but for equivalent loads Zola will be much faster than Hexo, probably a minimum of 5–10×, and Zola isn’t even particularly optimised, just written in Rust.) The WordPress download is 20MB compressed, 63MB uncompressed, containing almost half a million lines of PHP spread across over a thousand files (~16MB; around 55% code, the remainder blank or comments), over half a million lines of JavaScript in over 500 files (~25MB; around 67% code), a couple of hundred thousand of CSS in 700 files (~7.5MB; around 75% code), and the odd spot of other languages. (This is in languages where more code fairly directly means slower, even if faster code can claw that back; whereas in compiled languages, more code just means slower compilation, and runtime performance is comparatively uncorrelated.) That’s not particularly lightweight. Conceptually WordPress isn’t lightweight, either. I’ve never used WordPress myself, but I’ve seen three people using it, and in each case they were being drowned in choices and data fields, using two or three fields out of the thirty or more fields it was shoving in their faces; and the themes and plugins and such made matters considerably worse and more complex; and a lot of that complexity didn’t seem well-structured, though my observation has only ever been brief.