MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

I completely understand why things are going the way they are as our computing environment has become ever more hostile. But I am very nostalgic for the time where I would power up a Vic-20 and within seconds be able to get to work.

Teaching my daughter to program on a modern computer, we spend more time bootstrapping and in process, than we do in actual development.

That computers are just slower to interact with now is such a truism that we hardly remark upon it any more. It seems utterly insane that in the early 90's I could just run Windows 3.1 on a bit of kit that in all likelihood wouldn't even power a toaster today, and the experience was, well, frictionless. I don't recall ever thinking "wtf is this thing doing?", whereas today, by contrast, if I have the audacity to be afk for long enough for my Windows 10 box to go sleep I know I am in for an infuriating waste of minutes' worth of disk thrashing before the bloody thing even deigns to reacknowledge my existence.

I call this 'Outsourcing the cost of development to the user'...

Getting knowledgeable people costs money so we build more abstractions that lower the cost of development and pass the costs of development from the company to the user in the form of requiring more hardware to do the same thing.

How come I need 16Gb of RAM these days when 8Gb did it yesterday? How come my phone needs 4Gb of RAM while my 2012 tablet had 1Gb? Sure the hardware is cheaper but we're still not using the hardware to it's fullest.

The reason is very simple: developers don't want to develop anymore, they just want to offload real programming to third party libraries, where what used to take 100 lines of code to accomplish will take 10K or more (because, obviously, the library will do the most general version of what it wants to do). All this is considered "good development practices", which means that programs will inflate to take whatever memory is available and run slower for as long as we continue to use the same practices.