> to be that software should be fast, though I don't recall any justification for that philosophy other than suggesting that it is basically a truth
The gist is that if your code takes just a couple of seconds to complete on your fancy M1 Mac, there will be a pretty big chunk of your potential audience who will have to wait for minutes (and there's that surprising character trait in many non-technical users that they simply accept such bullshit, because they don't know that performance could be drastically improved without them having to buy new hardware).
But unless devs test their code also on low-end devices they will be completely oblivious to that problem.
And the actual problem isn't even the technical aspects, but that some devs are getting awfully defensive when confronted with the ugly truth that their code is too slow and start arguing instead of sitting down with their product mangager and making time for some profiling and optimization sessions to see what can be done about the performance problems without having to start from scratch.
What percentage of your target customers are going to have low end devices? And what is their estimated value compared to people who upgrade their tech (like most people with money would)?
Is it a problem or are those people simply not worth serving?
The gist is that if your code takes just a couple of seconds to complete on your fancy M1 Mac, there will be a pretty big chunk of your potential audience who will have to wait for minutes (and there's that surprising character trait in many non-technical users that they simply accept such bullshit, because they don't know that performance could be drastically improved without them having to buy new hardware).
But unless devs test their code also on low-end devices they will be completely oblivious to that problem.
And the actual problem isn't even the technical aspects, but that some devs are getting awfully defensive when confronted with the ugly truth that their code is too slow and start arguing instead of sitting down with their product mangager and making time for some profiling and optimization sessions to see what can be done about the performance problems without having to start from scratch.