[eslachance]

The way I see it, it's essentially because of frameworks and engines. For example in games, I've seen simple isometric games with very little graphic intensity build with huge game engines like Unity or Unreal. 20 years ago, that same game would have been built almost directly with machine code and be just as beautiful (adjusting for screen resolution and quality from back then). Well, that's my theory based largely on assumptions.

Software and Web is probably the same - I remember building very small websites from scratch, painstakingly writing each line of HTML and CSS myself to be as optimized as possible. Today, I'd probably have to start with a framework like Foundation or Bootstrap. Or maybe Semantic-UI which would require node.js to be installed and gulp and whatever. That stack can help with fast development, but it's probably not as optimized as doing everything in notepad++, right?

The company I work for just re-built our whole flagship product from scratch. It was previously in Delphi 6, and now it's in Java. Notwithstanding the prejudice against Java and speed, the reality is that the software now requires like 16MB of RAM and still takes more than a minute to load. And then it's slow as hell, both for use and for actually producing its output (it's print management and VDP).

Does it have anything to do with the number of librairies our dev team uses to "simplify their lives"? I'm guessing it might. http://help.objectiflune.com/EN/planetpress-connect-user-gui...