[sha90]

Article tl;dr: "I believe that apples are more efficient than oranges after all."

I just want to point out that the idea that "modern buildings use just enough material to fulfill their function and stay safe under the given conditions" is fundamentally at odds with the author's subsequent thesis.

Modern buildings don't use "just enough material", because "just enough material" would be _just_ concrete everywhere; it would have been "just wood" 200 years ago, but that's not good enough now. This is exactly the problem: it's not software that is unnecessarily bloated, it's software that has evolved to solve higher order problems, ones that are not simply based in how fast a computer can count to 10. Similarly, the definition of "fulfill their function" in the context of buildings have changed too. That definition changes all the time, even in building codes.

In the modern-building hierarchy of needs, we are way passed the "stay safe" level. We still optimize for safety, sure, but that hardly accounts for your spray foam insulation, HVACs, builtin wireless units, complex built-in cabinetry, complex appliances, and more. Simple things like "electricity" are now part of the definition of fulfilling building function. Go find a 200 year old building and you will find a building that simply does not fulfill today's functions. Even safety standards have and continue to change all the time. You can look at historical building codes and see evolving fire safety (asbestos? NO ASBESTOS!), seismic safety, and more.

This is the point. To say that Windows 95 is 30MB discounts the years of improved process space isolation, memory protection, Spectre mitigation, that, if missing, would cause enormous public backlash about why Microsoft doesn't care about security. Windows 10 is 100x larger because WE asked for it to be. WE wanted WiFi, VPN, IPv6 switchover and tunneling all added to our network stack. WE wanted GPU enhanced UI threads. WE want haptic feedback and touchscreens and predictive text and predictive multi-touch pixel accuracy for our touchscreen laptops. This extra complexity exists because our standards changed. A text editor isn't just something that renders ASCII anymore-- heck, it's not even just for rendering characters. My "text editor" is a full web browser because I _need_ that for development these days.

Extra complexity is a feature not a bug. We built computers specifically to do this stuff, not in spite of it. The abstractions and complexities aren't getting in our way, they are literally the things we are building. Does performance suffer? Maybe, but that's because we are explicitly paying into functionality. If you wanted a fast text editor, obviously a black-and-white screen that only renders 256 characters will be faster than VS Code, go ahead and use that software, but you're not getting the other things you probably want. Your very next complaint will undoubtedly be "how do easily I diff my Git branches?" -- and this is how software becomes more complex.

Welcome to progress.

[int_19h]

You don't need a web browser to edit text. As evidenced by dozens of excellent text editors that are not built on web browsers.

It's just easier to take a web browser that already has something approximating a text editor, and pile things on top of that.

And why is that? Well, because you want to support all the different platforms, and we as an industry have absolutely screwed up the portability story, and so we build it as hacks instead. There's absolutely no reason why developing a GUI app for macOS should be radically different from developing a GUI app for Windows or Linux - they all ultimately do the same thing. There's no sensible reason for them to be different. But they are. And so now the easiest way to solve that problem is to pile the browser on top, and forget that the differences exist. Of course, it doesn't actually solve the problem in general, because the differences are still there, and the industry as a whole still pays the overhead tax, in both man-hours of work someone has to spend maintaining that flimsy stack of abstractions, and in runtime performance tax those abstractions impose.

But the only way to fix it is to burn the whole thing to the ground. And that's not happening, because the short-term cost is too large to even contemplate any long-term gains.

[phyzome]

> My "text editor" is a full web browser because I _need_ that for development these days.

I mean, you definitely don't need a full web browser for software development. That's maybe the least worst option you have at the moment (which is sad) but it could be hella smaller.