>It was hard for me to write them off as people who just didn't understand how modern computers work.
I'm glad you didn't fall for that trap. Software engineers constantly make excuses for doing things in idiotic ways. Almost nothing I use really works anymore. It just "kind of" works most of the time. Look at your average web applicaton and the ridiculous resources it takes to get the thing up on the screen and interacting with the user. We've become addicted to high powered machines and finding more complex and inefficient ways of doing the same things.
Absolutely agree. I was playing with a BBC Micro last night, 2Mhz processor and 52k RAM (shadow RAM card fitted, and 16k sideways RAM - this is a beast of a machine!). Then I did some stuff on my 2x2.4Ghz, 4G RAM Mac, and I almost punched the damn thing in frustration, 2000x "faster" and it can't even keep up with my typing!
Well, maybe I'm not in that trap now, but I was for a long time.
> Almost nothing I use really works anymore.
I'm hoping that I can hide from that inside the Emacs monastery. That didn't seem to work for jwz though, so I'm not sure if there's a way to avoid having to update my silly software several times a decade.
JFC! I've been going through this at work today - the developers of a third-paty app designed the app for low utilization companies - our company is a bad fit for this software. We're in the top 500, and our usage patterns expose every scalability flaw in this software...
I'm glad you didn't fall for that trap. Software engineers constantly make excuses for doing things in idiotic ways. Almost nothing I use really works anymore. It just "kind of" works most of the time. Look at your average web applicaton and the ridiculous resources it takes to get the thing up on the screen and interacting with the user. We've become addicted to high powered machines and finding more complex and inefficient ways of doing the same things.