wanted to make a post about the perpetual arms race between hardware engineers making their devices as fast as possible and software engineers making their programs as unoptimized as possible, but i couldnt figure out a way to word it
all im gonna say is, theres functionally no reason a phone needs 16 gigs of ram and an insanely fast processor to run youtube. and "tick-tock". and occasionally texting your friends. maybe listen to music now and then. the fact that an iphone 8 is "outdated" and "slow" is stupid. why should an App with words and pictures use 6 gigs of ram. why should my device be able to handle 4k video. i cant even see the pixels anymore at 1080p on a 6 inch screen. cameras in phones are really good now? ok. only because companies stopped investing in producing small digital cameras. game graphics are super impressive on phones now? dont care. we had a tool for that. called a "handheld gaming console". you kids wouldnt understand.
fifty million fucking tonnes of e-waste every year because software vendors insist on writing everything in ffffffucking javascript. fuck you.
About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage. (Modern program editors request 100 times that much!) An operating system had to manage with 8,000 bytes, and a compiler had to fit into 32 Kbytes, whereas their modern descendants require megabytes. Has all this inflated software become any faster? On the contrary. Were it not for a thousand times faster hardware, modern software would be utterly unusable.
— Niklaus Wirth (1995), A plea for lean software
javascript and python are very beginner friendly languages and the more advanced parts of it tend to have well documented and well written tutorials. the level of entry to get someone learning C# or anything close to worrying about memory management is just a hurdle that most employees aren't willing to jump over and most employers aren't willing to go the extra mile to hire.
this isn't just a "el problema es un capitalismo" problem too like even if you have an open-source project you'll find more contributors and maintainers using a beginner-friendly language than one that isn't. whatever is easier to make gets made.
you might be able to argue that the only reason your favourite language and optimization protocols don't have the support that something like react-native and electron does is because the big companies have a vested interest in getting you to buy new products and thus optimization could even be considered a detriment to sales, but the more obvious answer is simply just, it's easier to get people into less performative ecosystems.
