> But running software that fit in kilobytes of RAM was never the goal of software engineering. The goal was providing value to your users. By this definition

> But running software that fit in kilobytes of RAM was never the goal of software engineering. The goal was providing value to your users. By this definition of the goal you are indeed obviously right. So it's pretty clear that Blow and others don't agree with this goal. I'll try to map out two different povs on the goal of engineering: imho the goal you are describing, talking about "value" etc is associated with a world-view based of economic exchanges, on the idea of markets. In this world-view, engineering will have as goal to sell something to a third-party and be profitable to you, thus you will minimize your costs and do the minimum you can get away with. This is the pov of current hegemonic the economic sphere. What Blow defends, ie an engineering goal of using minimal resources for a given concrete objective, is much more in line with a world-view based on commons, on basic infrastructure for common needs. In this world, the most natural setting for doing the engineering work is not one of economic exchange, but one of cooperative, where the people that need the thing get organized somehow to get the thing done. In this setting, it is clear that the goal is not to do the minimal thing they will be ok with, the goal is to create a durable tool that will be practical to use and use minimal resources. In particular the investment (in human planning) can be very high, it doesn't really matter. This world is also close to the concepts of lowtech (basically favoring simplicity and robustness). > Yes, some users do care, and I think that a disproportionate majority of them hang out on Hacker News. :P A disproportionate majority of what? This is a classical hn fallacy: yes apparently hn likes to defend things being done "nicely" (at a good technical/resource tradeoff point) and not just "well enough" (at a short term profitable tradeoff point). But the silent majority that doesn't care you are talking about is very much restricted to the people that can afford paying for ever changing computing devices. Old people (cannot change fast), young people (get old family devices), people in less geopolitically gifted areas (less globalized purchase power), .. they all have almost obsolete technologies because they are constrained in several ways. You are talking about the majority of people that are visible to your economic world, but a lot of people are not inside of it, or on its outskirts (and if you say "but the economic sphere must be more inclusive and expand" then you are again pushing a particular view, which is not the only one and is debatable). One can also make the case that with the current state of affairs regarding fossil energy and limits to growth, going further more and more people are going to have these big constraints. This second view is very popular with people thinking seriously about ecology and crisis.