Every now and then, I start my old Pentium 133 and play with it for a
little while. By "play" I mean either literally play (I do have a lot
of DOS games) or I simply browse through its file system, start some
editors, stuff like that. For the sake of nostalgia.
I noticed two things. First, and this strikes me every time I use it,
it's amazingly fast. Everything is slick, no lag, programs are started
in a fraction of a second or maybe one or two seconds. You see, this
machine's hardware is sooooooooooo much slower than our modern
hardware. Remember, we now take SSDs for granted. Even a Raspberry Pi
is more powerful than a Pentium 133. But still, the user experience is
about the same.
I was going to rant about how today's software sucks like hell. But
that's not the point, I think. The point is that the human brain has a
limited speed. And we're patient. It doesn't matter if it takes, say,
one second for your word processor to start -- or if it only takes ten
microseconds.
I think there's some kind of threshold. If the hard-/software is "fast
enough", it's okay for you and you will adapt to the little nuances.
If it's slower, you will complain. I think that threshold is: "Am I
able to think without interruption?" For example, when I want to write
down a phone number, I start an editor. I can keep my thought for some
seconds, so it's okay if my editor needs one second to start up (which
is, in absolute measures, very, very long). If it has started up in
ten microseconds, it's fine as well. But if it takes ten seconds, I
already may have forgotten the phone number.
I don't know if that's the best example but I think you get the idea.
That threshold also varies a lot. Remember the definition: "Am I able
to think without interruption?" Writing down a phone number is a time
critical task. Writing your diary is not. Here, it would be perfectly
fine for the editor to start up in ten seconds.
Conclusion: It's "okay" for today's programmers to be sloppy and write
inefficient, bloated code. Sure, you will notice the difference, but
you will get used to it -- as long as everything is "fast enough".
I don't like that conclusion because I want code to be "correct" and
"reasonable", "meaningful". In reality, though, it simply does not
matter...
I also think that writing efficient code will be a special skill one
day. I think there will be "efficiency classes" at university that are
*optional* (today, they are still mandatory, at least to my
knowledge). You'll only attend these classes if you want to specialize
in a certain field. All the other students will be happy with their
JavaScript frameworks.
Now, the second thing I noticed: It was perfectly fine to use that
80x25 screen in DOS. I didn't feel "trapped". When I open up a 80x25
terminal in Linux or a command prompt of that size in Windows, it
feels awfully tiny. I have no idea what's going on here. All those DOS
text editors even have *more* status lines and menus than my Vim.
That's crazy.
