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752 points dceddia | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.27s | source
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qsantos ◴[] No.36449864[source]
I am always frustrated with the usual answer to these kinds of demonstrations: “Yes, but these new apps are doing so much more. Also, security.”

Except, that they are not, not at the time they are launched at least. And even if they were, we have a hundred-fold more compute power, with a hundredth of the latency for memory and storage.

Regarding security, it should have negligible effect in most cases. At least, effects should not be perceptible to the human mind.

It really is just a consequence of the way we develop software nowadays. We do not need to optimize programs to make them work at all, so we just do not. We work on new features, and we hire people who can churn new features.

And we decided to optimize for developer time, instead of user time. So, instead of painstakingly developing a Web site, a native application, an Android app, and an iOS app, we just push Web apps everywhere.

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1. KMnO4 ◴[] No.36449990[source]
> And we decided to optimize for developer time, instead of user time

That’s exactly it, and there’s no shame in that. I can, as a solo developer, build a fully featured app with a responsive UI and produce artifacts that run on Windows, Linux, and Mac. I can do that in a weekend, because of the technologies we have at our disposal. Something that would have taken a team of developers several months to do.

On the other hand, the fact that we’re abstracting everything except the business logic away is a big advantage. As soon as Chrome pushes a performance update we can see apps across the board performing 10% faster.