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Comment by EL_Loco | Hacker News Reader

And he's not even talking about software bloat. The word processor I have on my early 90's Powerbook is more responsive, generally faster to use, than my current one running on a Core 2 duo processor. Oh, and by the way, I was once complaining about this to a friend who's in IT, and he told me how the speed in which a software runs doesn't mean anything regarding its quality. What I mean is, I was telling him how bad some new software was because it was quite slower than one 10 years older which did the same thing, and he tolde me that, in software engineering, this (speed) is never a measure of a program's quality. Is this universally accepted? Speed and responsiveness are not taken into account? I always meant to ask other people in this field, but always forgot.

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> Oh, and by the way, I was once complaining about this to a friend who's in IT, and he told me how the speed in which a software runs doesn't mean anything regarding its quality.

Your friend is wrong. It's an imperfect proxy, but looking at programs that do work, speed is a good proxy for quality, because speed means someone gives a damn. There are good programs that are slow, but bad programs all tend to be bloated.

Of course "speed" is something to be evaluated in context. In a group of e.g. 3D editors, a more responsive UI suggests a better editor. A more responsive UI in general suggests a better program in general.

> this (speed) is never a measure of a program's quality. Is this universally accepted?

Universally? No. It all depends on who you ask. Companies tend to say speed isn't, but the truth is, a lot of companies today don't care about quality at all - it's not what sells software. If you ask users, you'll get mixed answers, depending on whether the software they use often is slow enough to anger them regularly.

To me (on the internet since 92), speed is 100% a measure of a program’s quality. Intensive tasks get a pass (especially if they are pushed to a background queue), but IU responsiveness is definitely a measure of quality for me. Jason Fried has also written an optimized extensively for UI speed in Basecamp (a quick google shows an article from 2008). Speaking of: there has also been a lot written about Amazon’s discovery that every 100ms of latency cost them 1% of sales from people simply walking away from the “slow” site.

Especially when you’re doing the same task “template” on a day to day basis, even 1 second per input adds up quickly.

More like speed is a quality, whether you care about it or not is a different story.

In many cases I'm happy with simple but slow but fast enough.

One reason why I'm happy to not be in IT, is because of said bullshit. Maybe that means I am part of the problem, because if every programmer who has a problem with that, leaves, you're left with just the programmers like your friend who don't see anything wrong with this.

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