[coding123]

I feel like we had this debate a couple months ago. Someone posted that the computer at his local library could search and display data on available books super fast. (I think it was a twitter thread). The interface was programmed in the 90s or something. And then they complained about software today.

My reply was that now days you can, at home, search for a book on a specific interlibrary system, and find what specific libraries have it, download and check out an Ecopy, find out the number due back if you still wanted the hard one - AND have someone go hold it.

It's just not apples and apples anymore. I don't care how fast you can scan a text file in 90s written software.

[noobermin]

There is not reason you can't have the connectivity without having the unnecessary complexity of modern computing.

[Sebb767]

Alternative question: Why do I need to download 50 GB of book index to search for that one title and that index can't even do a full text search?

That complexity is Google (or your favourite search engine) running a datacenter indexing exabytes of data so that you can search it in the blink of an eye. Yes, it takes 600ms now instead of 50ms - but that's like complaining that your new eco car engine can't even properly run on aftermarket lamp petroleum.

[noobermin]

What does google's datacenter for a book index have to do with editing a file or rendering a button? That doesn't seem relevant at all to Wirth's law and isn't an justification for the increase in abstraction that has made things slower.

[badsectoracula]

Considering Wirth was apparently having that debate back in 1995 and even then it was far from a new idea, i doubt we'll solve it any time soon.

Software will just keep getting bloatier and bloatier and hardware more and more powerful to cope with the software inefficiencies (what? you think hitting hardware limits will solve this? nah, we'll just put more cpus in there so that software can be slow in parallel and of course train users to think slow software is normal).

[contravariant]

That said it's a bit weird to download a webpage of several megabytes that allows you to input a search that takes seconds to return a result, just to do the equivalent of a text search on a text file that's likely smaller than the webpage itself.

This isn't true for all search engines, but it is true for quite a few of them.

[mcguire]

So, having multiple tools with more capabilities makes up for being worse at a given task?

[jimktrains2]

Why does any of that require a slow, bloated UI? The UI is largely what people mean when they say software is slow and bloated.