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Comment by wsve | Hacker News Reader

Is your point that we should prioritize app performance and spending more on larger teams of develops, over the ease of quickly writing apps in popular frameworks that work on any system and the web?

If so, that's missing half the picture. "People don't care about performance" isn't why devs gravitate towards Electron. Devs and managers gravitate towards Electron because it means they don't have to hire extra people and do more work to get their native apps working on whatever operating systems they ship to and rewrite the whole app for the web. Yeah, it'd be nice not to have the performance penalty, but some teams have accurately calculated that the performance loss the customer realistically notices is worth the benefits of writing and maintaining the app.

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I feel like a lot of devs take things like YAGNI and “move fast and break” things a bit too seriously and to great extreme.

They’re too willing to accept an adequate solution because it “works” rather than spending just a little bit more time to find a more appropriate solution.

If it works (or even “works”) for the users and for the business, it’s probably appropriate.

That's a slippery one. Spreadsheets in Excel works for the business.

That doesn't mean it's appropriate to replace your billing system with one. Even if it works.

It's probably not useful to reason about a whole field in such absolute terms as what's best or what works.

Yet many small business billing systems are basically an excel sheet with a word doc or manual online invoice system like square invoices. You wouldn't replace a functioning billing system with this one, but you might not replace this one with an expensive custom system. As programmers, we often discount the value of our time to zero when we're writing software because it's kind of fun. But for a non programmer, 10-30 minutes of work each week invoicing isn't an issue if the system never gets into an unusable state.

Excel works for the business, but see how much money is estimatedly lost yearly due to excel mistakes.

Excel is the most widely used no-code/low-code environment by a wide margin. It's not surprising that something in such widespread use has a lot of bugs in aggregate. It's not the typical office automation written in <pick your favorite language> is bug-free either.

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