> "If speed/performance is a feature that your customers want to pay for, they will let you know. If it's not, then your competitor will eat your lunch"
This doesn't really disagree with the argument from the piece. You could summarize this line of thinking this way: The pressures at work in the software market drive us to create slower and slower software. It seems like everyone actually agrees on that point.
The only real disagreement seems to be how to respond to the fact. It's either, "Well shucks, that's just the way it is. At least I have auto-complete" or a feeling that, despite the pressures to just bloat and expand and slow down forever, it would be nice if we tried to combat it.
My counterargument would be that if the new way of building software proposed in the OP was actually a significant improvement, someone would have built a new IDE with it, and eaten JetBrains' lunch. Instead, we got Atom; prioritizing pluggability/extensibility/hackability over footprint/latency.
To be clear, I'm not arguing for a fatalistic position that "there's nothing we can do about it". We can, and do, optimize performance when required.
I'm just arguing for a more nuanced appreciation of the cost/benefit calculation that's at play here.
Either there's an explicit cost/benefit being done (e.g. a PM weighs the "go faster" story vs. the "add new widget" story) or an implicit one (app #1 prioritizes speed, app #2 prioritizes features, and customers vote with their dollars; market share reveals which is more valuable).
It is not possible to eat JetBrains and other's lunch, when only a subset of current generation is willing to pay for their tools, that is how Atom and Electron based GUIs get born.
This doesn't really disagree with the argument from the piece. You could summarize this line of thinking this way: The pressures at work in the software market drive us to create slower and slower software. It seems like everyone actually agrees on that point.
The only real disagreement seems to be how to respond to the fact. It's either, "Well shucks, that's just the way it is. At least I have auto-complete" or a feeling that, despite the pressures to just bloat and expand and slow down forever, it would be nice if we tried to combat it.