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Petroski was completely wrong about this. It is just that all of the gains from hardware have gone to enabling additional features rather than making the same feature set faster. Things like ripgrep make it more than obvious how fast simple software could be on modern hardware, but incentives are what they are and for most of the apps out there more features will be more profitable than more speed.

While there is an element of truth to that we have sacrificed performance for ease of development, especially in cross platform use cases.

(Often a reasonable trade off, imho)

Oh my god ripgrep is fast.

I was astounded when I first used ripgrep.

For sure. The first time I used it I doubted I had used it correctly because I could not believe it had actually grepped through all the ~34k files in my Rails app in under 30 ms.

Also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill's_law

I mean, these days I summon a super compute cluster for autocomplete in my IDE and chat with another with a 100k context window to pretty print large JSONs.