All software will approach "human speed," whether it's adding two integers or getting near instant predictions from a GAN. All available resources will be used until it's "good enough. Just ship it," and efficiencies will multiple as in any natural selection: defensive measures like "confusing code," and "unrelated system fails when this one is changed" allowing mostly harmless dumb code to survive and propagate.
Some intrepid learner comes to study the code one day. "Huh, I guess this is how you're supposed to do it. Seems kinda weird but I'm sure it was written this way for a reason. It's been like this for a decade!" And so they copy the procedure into their greenfield project.
Efficient code will always be sacrificed to the god of "Just Ship It" as long as the overall performance is "Good enough." And why not?
Only if you really have to use modern software (which, admittedly, we all have to from time to time). Vim, my terminal, grep and GCC are faster than ever!
To really enjoy computers the trick is to run old software on modern hardware.
Every year it seems to get worse.
Plus, most of modern Excel's apparent slowness comes from the animated text input and the animations between cells in the spreadsheet. I think that the text animations could be safely removed, but animations that give users a sense of relativity on the 2D plane when they make movements are very useful for UX.
Sorting large datasets with varying cell heights will bog down your system. Force uniform cell height and sorting can easily be twenty times quicker.
This doesn't happen with any other application.
Hiding the ribbon makes a _huge_ difference. That's hilarious and awful.
https://www.macintoshrepository.org/195-microsoft-excel-1-03...