Thanks for your comment, as a VIM user who often turns up my nose at “slow” IDEs it helped me to understand a perspective that I would otherwise ignore, and reminded me that ultimately it’s what works for the individual that matters over any dogmatism that I may have.
To offer an alternative perspective on this bit,
> If 99.9% of your users (i.e. the lay users, excluding the experts in the HN crowd) don't perceive your program/page to be slow, why would you optimize further?
For me personally as a practitioner of software engineering; because I can, and it’s meaningful to me to optimize in the broader context of designing and implementing a system, in part to see what’s possible in addition to the personal enjoyment of going through the process.
That being said, for a company focusing on optimizing value to customers as a function of engineering resource allocation, I agree that it doesn’t make sense to optimize. You summed it up nicely with “...but that’s not the fitness landscape that most software evolves in.”
> Thanks for your comment, as a VIM user who often turns up my nose at “slow” IDEs
Note that the mention of Vim by the original commenter is a red herring arising out of lack of familiarity with Wirth. In Wirth's eyes, even Vim would appear monstrous.
To appreciate Wirth's point requires realizing that his frame of reference is the Oberon (eco)system, which includes an OS, a mouse-driven graphical shell, a compiler, and the underlying CPU in an HDL all in a few tens of thousands of lines of code.
To offer an alternative perspective on this bit,
> If 99.9% of your users (i.e. the lay users, excluding the experts in the HN crowd) don't perceive your program/page to be slow, why would you optimize further?
For me personally as a practitioner of software engineering; because I can, and it’s meaningful to me to optimize in the broader context of designing and implementing a system, in part to see what’s possible in addition to the personal enjoyment of going through the process.
That being said, for a company focusing on optimizing value to customers as a function of engineering resource allocation, I agree that it doesn’t make sense to optimize. You summed it up nicely with “...but that’s not the fitness landscape that most software evolves in.”