The TLDR states that the current state of modern development prioritizes developer efficiency over all else, and that user experience is way under valued.
My problem with this isn't that it places value on user experience, it is in the premise that developer efficiency is prized above all else. Deploying an app today is just as hard as it was 15 years ago. The only two things that jump out in recent memory that made a very sizable difference on developer experience were Heroku, Github, Docker. Setting up a hello world with react and a basic API takes me a day or more, where as 10 years ago with jquery this was an hour or so. Deploying an app with K8s is google scale, but takes me a week to do, forget debugging something in production.
If we've been prioritizing developer efficiency at all costs we've failed pretty massively. I personally love the idea of optimizing a lot for developer efficiency because we can do deliver more value to others at the end of the day, but there's a lot of shiny new stuff that has some reason for existing which is definitely not developer efficiency.
> "If we've been prioritizing developer efficiency at all costs we've failed pretty massively."
Do we not hear all the time on HN, for example, that "Yeah, native apps are more efficient and look better but Electron lets us just write it once and deploy on multiple platforms"?
Electron allows you to package your webapp into a downloadable stand-alone package, but does not make your development any more or less painless if you decide to use modern Javascript frameworks and infrastructure built for Google-scale deployment.
A bloaty app that's not platform native is still infinitely more usable than something which doesn't exist at all.
Electron is one of a number of technologies which allow things to exist (in a non-optimal form) that might not be economically possible if a bigger team or a lot more time were required to ship them.
IMHO the sad thing is not that Electron exists, the sad thing is that we don't have stuff that's way easier like hypercard or VB6 was.
You hear the opposite, too. In fact, you'll hear both anytime an Electron app makes it to a front page, or if a company known for sticking to their guns on Electron or native announces literally anything.
React's efficiency is through its millions of packages. I had to build a project rapidly in React a short while ago and there was a package for everything.
A toggle? Yep. A timeline? Yep. A textarea? Yep. Toasts? Yep. Spinners? Yep. React just has so many pre-built components that you can add features very rapidly.
It's certainly a sentiment that is somewhat common. At the extreme end you have people arguing that you should optimize developer efficiency even over shipping working bug free software, which always blows my mind when I hear it. And I don't mean accidentally doing it, I mean knowingly shipping something that doesn't work.
My problem with this isn't that it places value on user experience, it is in the premise that developer efficiency is prized above all else. Deploying an app today is just as hard as it was 15 years ago. The only two things that jump out in recent memory that made a very sizable difference on developer experience were Heroku, Github, Docker. Setting up a hello world with react and a basic API takes me a day or more, where as 10 years ago with jquery this was an hour or so. Deploying an app with K8s is google scale, but takes me a week to do, forget debugging something in production.
If we've been prioritizing developer efficiency at all costs we've failed pretty massively. I personally love the idea of optimizing a lot for developer efficiency because we can do deliver more value to others at the end of the day, but there's a lot of shiny new stuff that has some reason for existing which is definitely not developer efficiency.