Re:Show HN: Wey – A fast, open-source Slack desktop app
by derefr on Monday April 09, 2018 @05:10PM
(#16797033)
> Not that we ever should have
You say that like people were making these bloaty apps for the good of humanity—trying to make them objectively perfect, but falling short. While FOSS is done with that mindset, FOSS isn’t usually where bloat comes from.
Bad engineering is usually the result of overriding business concerns: being first to market, iterating quicker than your competitors, having more reach on more platforms with less expense, etc. More features before feature polish, and user-visible polish before good architecture.
Even without Moore’s law, this incentive is still in place. It not just has a slight countervailing force of nobody wanting to run apps that take too many resources.
What that means in practice is that apps will still be as bloated as possible (or rather, with as little optimization done as possible) while still managing to not choke the machines they’re on.
You say that like people were making these bloaty apps for the good of humanity—trying to make them objectively perfect, but falling short. While FOSS is done with that mindset, FOSS isn’t usually where bloat comes from.
Bad engineering is usually the result of overriding business concerns: being first to market, iterating quicker than your competitors, having more reach on more platforms with less expense, etc. More features before feature polish, and user-visible polish before good architecture.
Even without Moore’s law, this incentive is still in place. It not just has a slight countervailing force of nobody wanting to run apps that take too many resources.
What that means in practice is that apps will still be as bloated as possible (or rather, with as little optimization done as possible) while still managing to not choke the machines they’re on.