Something that used to result in 2MB application with 5MB in memory requirement is now done as half a gigabyte of resources that will spawn dozens of processes totaling at least 1GB of memory. Sure, computers are faster, but not by that much apparently.
Looking at all those electron (et al) apps. Cheap to write beats user experience I guess.
Often times what's being optimized for isn't even the speed of experience and maybe that's ok. Chrome spawns a million processes so if a tab crashes it doesn't end your browsing session, VS code being written in electron means writing plugins is a breeze and thus has built a thriving ecosystem in a record amount of time. If nothing else the world of software is a lot more flexible in 2020 than 1990 and maybe people prefer that to raw speed (given there's not a huge demand for native terminal based applications there's an argument to be made)
How has document creation changed in two decades that justifies two orders of magnitude more RAM and CPU performance, 10x power draw, etc.?
If your house was built with 100x the resources and consumed that much more power, and it took longer to turn on the lights or cook a meal would it be justified because the building process was easier and you could add new light fixtures more easily? That would be lunacy, but for some reason we think it’s OK in software to avoid the craftsmanship the profession demands while treat users like fools who should just accept that computers are faster so their apps should be slower. It’s garbage reasoning. The ergonomics of developers should always come second to providing the best for customers.
I can run xlookup functions on a 1000 row excel spreadsheet on my cell phone.
> Chrome spawns a million processes so if a tab crashes it doesn't end your browsing session
This one is funny, because
1) before Chrome pages didn't seem to crash (js could, but not the whole "page")
2) Chrome still crashes completely loads of times
(also it's not really related; Chrome is a fast application written relatively effectively)
But I get your point, and you are not wrong. I just wouldn't discount "cheap development" to be the primary reason.
You can really see the loss of efficiency in modern software by using the same program/application on a modern machine vs a 10 or 15 year old machine. I have a couple of older laptops (2001 era Dell Latitude CPx with a PIII 500MHz, 2011 Lenovo Ideapad netbook with the Atom N450 1.6GHz) that I will occasionally play around with. I've found that most of what the article author said applies; textual interfaces with minimal or no mouse usage runs perfectly well on either of those old beasts, even with code written in 2020 and optimized for modern hardware. The "suckless" suite of tools in particular (dwm, st, surf, etc.) make those otherwise unusable machines into something approaching modern workstation utility. You don't want to even try to run any modern graphically rich software on those devices as you'll be frustrated immediately, and it will be clear just how bloated and unnecessary a lot of modern design has become.
I feel as long as we keep advancing in raw computing power, the software can be allowed to grow and make use of the extra power, but we will eventually reach a standoff where the hardware stops advancing and at that point we will need to focus on reducing, not increasing, software bloat if we wish to maintain efficiency.
Running slack, rstudio, atom and a browser was almost maxing out an 8gb machine.
Why does an IM client need over a gig of ram?
What exactly was faster to do 20 years ago than now?
Adding features will almost inevitably make software slower. Sometimes the difference is smaller, sometimes larger.
"extra few features" would fit more to likes of vim.
I used e.g. gedit (linux) and pspad (windows) during that time and both completely froze on larger files.
But generally I do not think the premise is correct. Loading a game from a datasette took easily 15 minutes (later there was acceleration only a few minutes)
Loading a game from a cardigde (what was usual at the time) was much faster than anything we use now, but this is not a fair comparison.
It's a fact that nowadays a lot of apps are very slow, on computers and phones alike -- and socially and culturally that's unacceptable for non-technical people.
It's not fair comparison since the games are completely different beasts today - huge open worlds, detailed textures, complex AIs.
Game studios could design games which are super fast to load and play but some other aspect would suffer instead. It's a trade off and it looks like users are OK with waiting a little bit if it means better gameplay.
My mom simply wanted instantly loading calendar and grocery list apps. I know that's achievable because I've done (parts of) such apps in the past and they were faster than others.
It's not such a stretch to imagine people being frustrated with lags everywhere (and those lags do objectively exist). And I've met a good amount of people frustrated with the current breed of software as well.
Modern apps don't bring almost anything new or improved to the table. They should be lightning fast but they are not.
Cartiges don't have a loading time, and are a technology that is available today, but that people abandoned because they are expensive and difficult to update.
:(
It's just the load time of cartiges that aren't a fair goal.
For example back then they did not index files at startup since there was no function for that (like "find references"). These days IDEs provide a lot of "intelligence" and static analysis for which you need memory, a lot of reads and processing.
So yeah, I guess VS got slower but it's because it's now doing much more (useful) things.
As mentioned in a reply bellow, syntax highlighting is a feature that was (and is) blazingly fast in every software except atom-based editors. Startup times are atrocious too.
Spotify.
And as mentioned in my comment, speed can be influenced by the size or memory requirements. And that becomes issue on its own when you want to use multiple of these applications. I constantly run into full ram and swapping with 16GB. Mostly caused by web applications, but the root cause is the same. Size on disk (or when updating) also matters on phones a lot.
I think it'd be more accurate to say value to the user beats the cost to write the software, which then beats user experience.
Something can offer a lot of value and use but still be a pain to use.
Having to make Apps that will get published and not banned, all while trying to keep costs low forces developers into JavaScript solutions.
If it was low cost to develop a native iPhone app, this would not be an issue.
What do you mean when you say that the problem is half Apple's fault? Or, like every other comment your account hasd made in the last 24-48 hours, is it just an attempt to start an Apple flamewar?