Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?

We just rely on layers and layers of cruft. We then demand improvements when things get too bad, but we're only operating on the very top layer where even dramatic improvements and magic are irrelevant.

Windows is especially bad at this due to so much legacy reliance, which is also kind of why people still bother with Windows. Not to claim that Linux or MacOS don't have similar problems (ahem, Catalyst) but it's not as overt.

A lot of the blame gets placed on easy to see things like an Electron app, but really the problem is so substantial that even native apps perform slower, use more resources, and aren't doing a whole lot more than they used to. Windows Terminal is a great example of this.

Combine this with the fact that most teams aren't given the space to actually maintain (because maintaining doesn't result in direct profits), and you've got a winning combination!

While you are definitely right to a degree, let’s also not forget that depending on how far we go back, everything was English, ascii-only with no accessibility and security.

By requiring more than that, we had to increase the essential complexity. I believe this tradeoff in itself is well worth it (and hopefully we can all agree on that going back to us-ascii-only locale is not a forward direction).

The problem I see is that the layers you also mention, each expose leaky abstractions (note that abstractions are not the problem, no person on Earth could implement anything remotely useful without abstractions — that’s our only tool to fight against complexity, of which a significant amount is essential, that is not reducible). Let’s also add a “definition” I read in a HN comment on what constitutes an ‘expert’: “knowing at least 2 layers beneath the one one is working with” (not sure if it was 1 or 2).

Given that not many people are experts and a tendency of cheaping out on devs, people indeed are only scratching that top layer (often not even understanding that single one!), but the problem might also be in how we organize these layers? When an abstraction works well it can really be a breeze and a huge (or only significant, see Brooks) productivity boost to just add a library and be done with it — so maybe the primitives we use for these layers are inadequate?