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I see your point, but… > There’s just no reason to waste time tuning software for optimal efficiency if the users hardware is powerful enough they’d never even

I see your point, but… > There’s just no reason to waste time tuning software for optimal efficiency if the users hardware is powerful enough they’d never even notice. …but users do notice. They notice that their browser is slow, 8GB RAM isn't enough, every app they download is multiple hundred megabytes or even multiple gigabytes. Only very rarely can apps justify being that large. I build native apps and pick native apps over alternatives and the experience is much, much nicer. Whether users could articulate what they're experiencing is a different question. The bad experience we're talking about had been normalised over the past 15 years or so.

9dev 2y ago
> Whether users could articulate what they're experiencing is a different question. The bad experience we're talking about had been normalised over the past 15 years or so. I could counter that by saying people have had unpleasant experiences with software before, too; being way too technical and non-intuitive is one of that. But my point isn't just that users won't notice anyway, but optimising for that isn't a good strategy anymore—at least from the perspective of commercial software vendors. Performance tuning reaches a point of diminishing returns very quickly.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  Optimising for older hardware might not be a good commercial strategy, but I still get a kick out of making my software nimble and fast. I like to joke giving engineers fast machines is a mistake, that having them on 8GB dual-core Celerons would help optimise their software. OTOH, it’s also a valuable strategy to give them now the machines that’ll be mainstream when the product is finished. That one I learned from Alan Kay and the Alto.