> bloat means a massive decrease in the cost and time taken to develop software. In the past, programmers bit-banged I/O bare metal, and hardware tinkerers sol

> bloat means a massive decrease in the cost and time taken to develop software. In the past, programmers bit-banged I/O bare metal, and hardware tinkerers soldered computers from TTL IC's. Today, programmers code in Python & glue software libraries together. Hardware folks wire CPU-powered peripherals onto creditcard sized supercomputers. Same concept. Only the building blocks have increased in their (internal) complexity.