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Comment by robin_reala | Hacker News Reader

There is definitely value to be had in using systems that force you to write high-performing code. In the web space we all too often we sit down at high powered macs to write code that will be run by low-end Android devices, and fail to appreciate the consequences.

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I'm always wondering about thoughts like this. Although there are likely a humongous amounts of low end devices, as a whole, how much potential return would you get from this group? This is a value judgment and I know many have low end devices for reasons other than monetary and just completely ignoring quantity may not be viable for certain investments, its just an interesting thing. It might be similar to the debate about the cost of handling credit cards vs cash. Cash has its own set of costs that are usually neglected. You could easily get more return by adding features than spending any time optimizing.

> how much potential return would you get from this group?

This reads a bit like "these poor sods can't afford to pay for my app, so why bother", at least to me.

However even if a certain device owner subgroup doesn't represent a potential revenue stream, you can as a developer still profit from also (or even primarily) targeting their devices.

Apps that will run on lower-powered devices will almost necessarily be leaner, and as a side benefit will have less complexity, less dependencies, and, ultimately, less technical debt for you as the developer to manage.

> low-end Android devices

Or even just devices in high-latency environments. This gets missed in development so often. My experience is that 75% of apps cannot handle it and fail to work in all kinds of ~~interesting~~ frustrating ways.

> all too often we sit down at high powered macs

I think you mean you. I don't and never have done that, and I suspect millions of windows developers have not either.

I think they mean them, and the obviously-high percentage of developers that use Macs compared to the general population of users. Which, ironically, skews the percentage of Windows users lower than most other demographics.

In fact, how dare you forget the Linux users when writing your comment?!

Faced with the option to pay higher costs for incredibly good hardware, or to run any of the many *nix distros, you chose to have meh hardware, and a restrictive OS that is built as a GUI first, terminal a distant second.

Just… why.

As someone with years of windows and Linux experience, yes the Linux shell is quite good, but mac bsd shell is terrible, even compared to powershell

Bash is bash, zsh is zsh; how are they different? coreutils differs, sure, and I dislike BSD’s implementation of them, but that’s why gnu-coreutils exists.

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