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No part of me wishes computers were limited like they were then, I just wish software in general didn't assume it was the only thing running on someone's machine and was not so cavalier with resource usage.

If Slack's desktop client was written in efficient C++ using platform specific UI framworks it would likely be one to two orders of magnitude more efficient across all important metrics. Unfortunately the desktop app is basically an entire web browser instance running JavaScript code.

I can see the appeal, however. Write once run anywhere is a hell of a drug.

> I can see the appeal, however. Write once run anywhere is a hell of a drug.

It's not just that. It's that you're not paid to write good code, nor efficient code. You're paid to write any shit that works good enough to be sold to users, and to write it as quickly as you can.

At my first job, a machine of that spec was a typical AutoCAD workstation (although some still ran DOS). The really grunty DX50s even had 16MB of RAM (whoa).