[stillsut]

> what the fuck are programmers thinking when writing today's programs

The difference is in the old days, you adapted to computer. Now, computer must adapt to you.

Take a look at MS's latest text-editor program's release notes (https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_10). They have to build a program that accommodates so many different existing must-have features (from a potential users POV), and for each feature, accommodate almost every flavor of configuration that has ever existed for any other text editor whose style the potential user is now "locked-in to". Otherwise user will refuse to adopt.

In the 70's, I assume the audience was a pretty tight knit community of computer engineers, coming from a time of very frustrating tooling where it wouldn't be uncommon to lose a day's work because the 'Save' function failed or something like that. In this environment, you learned the crazy unintuitive keymap for vi and called it a blessing.

Now, you yell at your editor if it doesn't remind you to save your work when you close it. Or you yell at it when it does remind you; too many pop-ups! The point is that user preferences are more fragmented and expectations are higher for features, and willingness to learn details and gotchas of a program are lower, which has created the bloated program for the simple things like text editors.

[gens]

As a contrast, I use sublime. It has (almost) everything I desire. And it saves everything i write, even in the case of a power outage.

Another example would be Acme[0].

>The point is that user preferences are more fragmented and expectations are higher for features, and willingness to learn details and gotchas of a program are lower, which has created the bloated program for the simple things like text editors.

I agree. People are people and people will always be subjective. But there should be a distinction between feature bloat and node.js bloat. Still, ofc, to each his own. (I measure how good it is for me by how much hair i pull out by using it, be it by lack of features, bugs, performance, or anything)

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M and https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...