Jonathan Blow

Only a tiny minority of professional programmers have a clear picture in their minds of how fast modern computers are. 99.9% have next to no idea. How does this affect software that is even conceived? (Ignoring, for a moment, what is actually built, which we know is very slow).

it's bc of time and money, right? the faster our computers become, the less time and skill devs need to finish and release a product. the performance gain of a faster cpu gen is used to make _software development_ faster (and easier), not to make the software itself faster.

we abstract the hard parts away so development gets easier at the cost of efficiency and reliability. that kinda sucks. but it's also cool that people without a strong computer science background can sit down and write apps.

This is the common viewpoint, but I disagree with it. For example, development is not easier -- web development, for example, is ridiculously overcomplex and difficult for what it is. And that is the place where the most "tools" exist. Coincidence?

web development got harder and more complex because we drastically changed our requirements for what the web should be able to do (interactivity, instant server-feedback, etc) with the tools used (html/css/js) slow to catch up.