You're right about a lot but I really want to argue against the idea "people don't care." They do care. They care when their phone dies after 2 years and they have to buy a new one because updates have rendered it unusable. They care when the phone/pc/laptop gets hot with only a few tabs open. Polls seem to show people generally care about climate change, and as little as PC's use in energy (relative to transportation and electricity generation for things like heating), they probably would care about this too. Users just don't understand things could be better, especially if they're younger and they don't remember windows 2000 or dos for example. On the other hand, every older person I know curses the newfangled things, even if there are some new connectivity capabilities of modern machines.

And the thing is that connectivity has little shit to do with the layers of abstraction to idk render a button on a screen. Even developers, as your anecdote shows, lack the creativity to imagine better things! Christ if that doesn't show something is wrong than what will?

I’m not even that old (early 30s) and I curse at 99% of the tech I use. Especially tech that we use to build other tech.

I started my career as a software engineer writing C, then C++ working on desktop software. Things made sense back then, and that was just 10 years ago.

I’ve tried contributing features to two Electron-based apps. I gave up on both. I just can’t make sense of it.

I’ve sat down countless times over the last decade telling myself I’m going to teach myself this damn frontend web stuff. I gave up every time. It’s ridiculous.

Young folks who have only been exposed to modern garbage have no idea how good it was before the web took over.

I often wonder how this came to be. How we went from well-documented, efficient, sound APIs and libraries to the monstrosity that we have now. I have nothing to offer though.

> but most people won't care.

Charity Majors said about reliability: "Nines don’t matter if users aren’t happy."

I'd propose an alternative view here: "Bloat doesn't matter if users are happy."

Actually one of my desktop products received very much praises from the customers who (aside of nice features and responsiveness) also loved how few MB big single exe with no dependencies does so much more and faster than 1.5 GB download from the competitor.

My other current product custom made for a customer in C++ is business server that receives various commands over http, does lots of calculations and delivers data that are used to generate a report (I wrote a report generator in JavaScript and it runs on a browser). The whole thing is again single exe that needs nothing but connection to a database. The exe itself is around 1MB vs again gigabytes for the old mess they were using before and is more than 100 fold more performant. The customer was simply shocked when they saw a result.They did not think it was possible.

Users are happy until they saw better :)

Today bloat doesn’t matter, tomorrow you’re are a fat dinosaur

Sure, but... that confirms this view.

This view is more akin to working class parents telling their children to become a builder because “people have always been building”.

You should not outsource your main product. And if your product is a chat application that is supposed to be fast and always on the background, then you’re outsourcing your main area of expertise.

> "It seems there are two distinct branches of computing emerging - one where performance matters, and one where it doesn't."

The unfortunate corollary being that the prevalence of developers who treat it as if it doesn't makes it darned hard to find one who treats as if it does when you need one.

> "Applications made for "consumers" tend to be made like a cheap car"

Not really a great analogy. The Prius has a reputation for quality and reliability; it's often seen used in taxi fleets, where those qualities are a must. Luxury cars often have high maintenance requirements and poor reliability since cost is not a concern to their owners.

> Luxury cars often have high maintenance requirements and poor reliability since cost is not a concern to their owners.

This is absolutely a nit and does not disqualify your overarching statement at all, but generally these attributes are due to the constraints of technology-- for example, fitting large, high performance engines necessarily increases the frequency of maintenance intervals as well as the difficulty (and therefore, cost) of maintenance. If luxury car manufacturers could make cars with the handling and performance characteristics of their flagship models but with the maintenance costs and intervals of a Toyota Corolla, they absolutely would.

This tends not to be why luxury models are unreliable in practice.

Luxury models are used by the manufacturer as a proving ground for the tech they're going to filter down to the mass market models next. Luxury model customers are relatively price-insensitive but want to be able to show off shiny features, so they get the exclusive new tech that's not been tried at scale yet. Thus the unreliability. It's not the technical constraints, it's the maturity of the technology.

The main reason Priuses are used as cabs are local regulations, i.e. airports not allowing non-hybrid cabs, etc. For passengers experience is sub-standard compared to regular cabs.

What’s substandard about a Prius? They’re fantastic cars.

Good post. I would add that since Moore's law is over, I think the long-term prospects for crap like electron and discord are not good. Future phones and laptops will (almost certainly) never be orders of magnitude more powerful for regular workloads, so assuming that people will want to do more and more with these devices, it seems that software that burns millions of cpu cycles and gigabytes of ram just to put some pixels on the screen and send some http packets will eventually get squeezed out of the marketplace.

unfortunately, now the most messaging apps (teams, slack, signal come to mind) pack their UI with electron

I have to say I don't really get the analogy with Bentley vs Prius. Engineering the Prius seems like it's both more challenging and rewarding. Constraints are tighter and expectations of reliability are higher, and efficiencies are more important - in fact, the Prius is all about efficiency.

(Also, the point about your someone "with a CS degree" - it's completely irrelevant that they had a CS degree, AFAICT. It mostly comes down to their prior experience, and they clearly didn't have a lot of it. That's mostly orthogonal to education.

I also wouldn't pick C++ for a CRUD app, not without very specific requirements. I'd choose C# if there's no existing web app, but if there's an existing web app, or there's going to be one, Electron makes a lot of sense.)

> It seems there are two distinct branches of computing emerging - one where performance matters, and one where it doesn't.

The thing is - there is no need to address performance if it does not matter. That would lead you to Knuth:

"The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - Knuth

So I think there is actually a dial: if performance matters you turn it one way and optimize as necessary; if it doesn't go onto the next project that is fighting to get out of your head.

Please do not take this (Knuths statement) out of context. It is necessary read the whole text to understand this sentence. It has nothing to do with whether performance matters.

but sometimes performance is dependent upon your framework, so before you start you will need to know your quantity structure

There's another type of consumer-facing computing where performance matters: embedded computing on small, weak devices.

These are also very cheap devices, but they rarely have the resources to run something as bloated as an Electron app.

>Slack isn't meant to be open on your work machine while you're compiling code

meant by who ? Because I certainly keep slack open while I am compiling. And it seems to me that it is meant to be kept open in the background while you do other stuff.

I wish slack seemed fast for me. It's like typing into molasses.

Dual Core and Quad core were also massive improvements in performance.