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Comment by dano | Hacker News Reader

* This * - The users don't care about the tech. They care about the result.

To the extent users do care about the tech, they care about performance not how "clean" the code is or whether you're using the newest framework. Users hate when software is slow or uses an exorbitant amount of memory.

Most users have no idea how much memory a piece of software uses. They care about user experience though which means they will care if the UI hangs or is unresponsive.

Bingo. I’d go further and say they don’t care about your application at all. They just want to do something, and your application’s quality is measured by how little it stands in the way of accomplishing that.

The sad fact is this encapsulates features (ease of development, a framework probably does help you ship faster), adaptability (clean abstractions that are easy to work with), and performance.

Finding that balance is always going to be hard but they’re all important!

Yeah, I totally agree. Those other factors are internal optimizations. What gets me is when a team wants to switch horses to new tech and do a forklift upgrade just to implement something using the new hotness.

And if the product is aimed at prousers/communities who extend the functionality themselves with their own commands, scripts and plugins.

This 100%. It's especially noticeable in the world of game development, where you see games that are ridiculously buggy and poorly made (on a coding basis) selling millions of copies and changing the industry. The original generation 1 Pokemon games are probably some of the best examples of this, though I'm pretty sure anyone who's reversed engineered any game from the Atari era onwards has probably been left wondering "what the hell were they thinking?"

But it doesn't matter. They were designed well, they were fun to play, and millions of people enjoyed them.

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