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This seems to take a moral stance that efficient is better. However that’s not always practically true. Efficiency often means inflexible and brittle with respe

This seems to take a moral stance that efficient is better. However that’s not always practically true. Efficiency often means inflexible and brittle with respect to change and time. Abstraction generally trades efficiency for ease in change over time, or parsimony for the developer in exchange for expense at runtime. If it doesn’t matter - it doesn’t matter. If the goal is making a document format that is flexible enough to accommodate history, concurrent editing, various layouts and embedding, etc, all this comes with abstractions that add inefficiency. The trade off is ease in adding and changing to the format and the software that consumes and produces the format. If the consequence in the real world is effective unobservable in any material way, who cares? Maybe as a moralistic measure it’s offensive that something lacking parsimony is practical. But from any meaningful measure - the users perspective, the developer, even the company paying for the processing - if it doesn’t matter - it literally doesn’t matter. Comparing Google Docs to a program hosted on an Apollo era flight computer is obtuse to an extreme, and I would rather write my collaboratively edited documents with Google Docs than Apollo era flight computer any day no matter whether one is less parsimonious than the other.

rpdillon 3y ago
> Maybe as a moralistic measure it’s offensive that something lacking parsimony is practical. But from any meaningful measure - the users perspective, the developer, even the company paying for the processing - if it doesn’t matter - it literally doesn’t matter. Except the post you're responding to was literally in response to a user problem trying to edit a 30MB document in Google Docs. So it very much does matter, from the user perspective. > Comparing Google Docs to a program hosted on an Apollo era flight computer is obtuse to an extreme, and I would rather write my collaboratively edited documents with Google Docs than Apollo era flight computer any day no matter whether one is less parsimonious than the other. Straw man. The post compares Google Docs to LibreOffice (a competing product), and points out that LibreOffice solves the user's problem (editing a 30MB document) and Google Docs cannot.

rpdillon 3y ago

> Maybe as a moralistic measure it’s offensive that something lacking parsimony is practical. But from any meaningful measure - the users perspective, the developer, even the company paying for the processing - if it doesn’t matter - it literally doesn’t matter. Except the post you're responding to was literally in response to a user problem trying to edit a 30MB document in Google Docs. So it very much does matter, from the user perspective. > Comparing Google Docs to a program hosted on an Apollo era flight computer is obtuse to an extreme, and I would rather write my collaboratively edited documents with Google Docs than Apollo era flight computer any day no matter whether one is less parsimonious than the other. Straw man. The post compares Google Docs to LibreOffice (a competing product), and points out that LibreOffice solves the user's problem (editing a 30MB document) and Google Docs cannot.