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Comment by biosboiii | Hacker News Reader

The engineers of ASML, TSMC and others wake up every day, shoot lasers on liquid lead to generate light with extreme short wavelenghts, to make smaller and more performant chips.

And web developers wake up every day so that no one notices their work.

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nitpick: TSMC's EUV process uses lasers to vaporize tin, not lead, into EUV emitting plasma.

Does the tin itself lase? Is the radiation given off from the tin single-frequency and phase coherent?

No. And it doesn’t matter for their use case.

seems like a recipe for fragility... The mixtures of wavelengths will make optimizing other parts of the process very hard. And even keeping a consistent mix of wavelengths isn't easy.

Well, go apply here: https://www.cymer.com/careers/

Given the criticality of the tech, I'm sure the price will be met.

More performant chips mean you can have more software abstraction and build things quickly. The increase in chip speed does not correspond to faster program execution but rather faster program authorship.

It's easier to train an army of web developers to build React applications than to teach them PHP + JS, Ruby + JS, etc. Those React developers can also (on average; many people are insanely productive in "uncool" languages) write applications more quickly.

For example, a company could write their app for macOS + Windows + Linux using native frameworks, or they could write their app once in JS + Electron.

A native app would certainly be much more performant, but that comes at the cost of being much more difficult to build, and most likely, Linux would not be supported at all.

Faster or just cheaper web devs that won’t unionize?

Both, probably.

If you can teach more people how to write web apps, that skill becomes less valuable.

What you've described is simply a tooling problem. We can (and should) have tooling that creates native, performant apps and is as easy to create with as React.

I think you're right; we just aren't there yet.

My point was that these performance increases aren't simply going into the void, they're being transformed into productivity increases.

Wouldn't it be hilarious if some ASML/TSMC engineers used Canva internally? I bet it happens in some corner.

They certainly do, somewhere.

It's not against web devs in general, but this "give a man a hammer and every problem looks like a nail" approach to things. Apps like Canva are unusable for me on my old PC. Many websites too. I have only about 15GB of mobile data, some websites take like 20 megabytes of my monthly without any fancy video/imagery.

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