I look forward to Moore's law ending, because then software might actually become good again (lol probably not)
It really does not require new expertise or tech at all to cut latency and load times by 90%. Programmers have to get back to being engineers instead of just duct taping libraries together or praying that the dumb GC knows what its doing
At most places, there’s barely enough time to implement things completely let alone to optimize everything properly.
It’s also noteworthy that optimizing 10kloc from yesteryear is a much easier task than optimizing a few mloc of code today.
We didn’t just lose all those optimized libraries. The requirements bloated and nobody wants to reduce features.
Looking at a flame graph 60 levels deep demonstrates the problem pretty well I think.
If Python or JS sit idle waiting for user input, are the efficiencies really so different?
Developer time also has energy cost in AC, transport, etc for a human.
What about the fact that the cost of web inefficiency is offloaded to the user? Users pay the power bill for the overcomplicated, slow, unnecessarily CPU intensive front end.
So, at a surface level, what you say is true, but the deeper picture is complicated.
The tooling, too, has gone a certain way... making a native GUI is now slower, less documented, less catered-to than web UI; in my opinion, for most simple to moderately complex UIs, native is going to take twice as long to make look good... but that inverts, in my experience, as the program and UI become more complicated.
It's also strange that the UI itself is so bloated and developmentally time consuming. We lived on the CLI once -- maybe in some not too distant future a killer app can once again show consumers the power of the command line. After all, google/Siri/Alexa do just that.
Nit pick: Python is typically at least an order of magnitude slower than JS, it's a whole different class of slow.
> Developer time also has energy cost in AC, transport, etc for a human.
Yes and fixing bugs in production is especially expensive. Presumably that's why Python is now trying to retrofit static types. There are statically typed languages that are just as terse as Python.