> We're doomed to use slow and shitty software until the present web fads go away and the ecosystem stabilizes.
I have two possibly conflicting thoughts about this. (I'm a little bit older, and I feel like this has nothing to do with the web.)
One, everything computer related was much, much slower, and much, much shittier when MS Paint first came out. I feel like software and software standards and hardware and the web, all of it, has improved.
Two, I'm not convinced we'll ever escape shitty software, I think we always have and always will have slow and shitty software, outside the web and inside. We always want the machine to do more than we have a budget for, we always want to write features in less time than we have, we always want cooler features than others, etc., etc. Keeping software fast and good is time consuming, expensive, takes more self control than most have, and often just isn't the highest economic priority. In short, I think there are legitimate reasons we're always sitting at the threshold of pain rather than the threshold of pleasure.
Seems to me like "shitty software" is just a moving target. All software is shitty because we can envision something better. In 10 years we'll all be complaining that Windows 20/macOS 23/iOS 21/Android {{confectionName}} is shitty, though surely it will be something that our 2018 brains would find amazing.
I'll give you one definition of shitty that particularly annoys me: does the same or less than an equivalent made 10+ years ago, while running just as fast or slower than the old one. Advances in hardware seem to be mysteriously eaten somewhere.
I have two possibly conflicting thoughts about this. (I'm a little bit older, and I feel like this has nothing to do with the web.)
One, everything computer related was much, much slower, and much, much shittier when MS Paint first came out. I feel like software and software standards and hardware and the web, all of it, has improved.
Two, I'm not convinced we'll ever escape shitty software, I think we always have and always will have slow and shitty software, outside the web and inside. We always want the machine to do more than we have a budget for, we always want to write features in less time than we have, we always want cooler features than others, etc., etc. Keeping software fast and good is time consuming, expensive, takes more self control than most have, and often just isn't the highest economic priority. In short, I think there are legitimate reasons we're always sitting at the threshold of pain rather than the threshold of pleasure.