I don't really pine for the days of the PDP-8, when programmers had to make sure that almost every routine took fewer than 128 words, or the days of System/360, when you had to decide whether the fastest way to clear a register was to subtract it from itself or exclusive-or it with itself. We wasted a lot of time trying to get around stringent limitations of the technology just to do anything at all.
I just looked at the Activity Monitor on my Macbook. Emacs is using 115MB, Thunderbird is at 900MB, Chrome is at something like 2GB (I lost track of all the Renderer processes), and a Freecell game is using 164MB. Freecell, which ran just fine on Windows 95 in 8MB!
I'm quite happy with a video game taking a few gigabytes of memory, with all the art and sound assets it wants to keep loaded. But I really wonder whether we've lost something by not making more of an effort to use resources more frugally.
Remember, there's a gigabit pathway between server and browser, so use as much of the bandwidth as you need.
I'll bite. What do you think we've lost? What would the benefit be of using resources more frugally?
Disclosure: I'm an embedded systems programmer. I frequently find myself in the position where I have to be very careful with my usage of CPU cycles and memory resources. I still think we'd all be better off with infinitely fast, infinitely resourced computers. IMO, austerity offers no benefit.
(Remember Bill Atkinson's famous response, quoted here to how much code he'd written that week: -3000. He had reworked Quickdraw so that it was faster and better, with a net loss of 3000 lines of code.) Of course the classic Mac had its own constraints.
My sense is that there's a "conceptual" austerity, due to the limited ability of the human mind to understand complex systems. The programmers are satisfied that the product is documented, because it passes tests, and "the source code expresses what the program does." But nobody can explain it to me, in situations where I have to be involved because something has gone wrong.
The system has surpassed some threshold of conceptual austerity when the majority of the devs have concluded that the only hope is to scrap it and start over, but they can't, because they don't know what it's supposed to do, and can't find out.
On the other hand, the infinite computer would take care of this for us too. We're faced with semi-infinite computers at the present time, that can be filled to the brim with stuff that they can't themselves understand or manage. But all real things are finite.
Well, sure. But these computers don't exist, so that doesn't really matter.
The main reason I bought a new laptop last year is because the frontend build process needed about 5G of RAM and ~4 minutes, which was a real productivity-killed. I'm not a frontend dev, I inherited all of this, and wasn't so easy to fix for both technical and organisational reasons.
Excessive austerity offers no benefit, I agree, but some projects are out of control in their resource usage, and impose a real burden with it.
Data centers use a lot of electricity. Even a 10% reduction would cause huge impact world wide
On the desktop we definitely lost responsiveness. Many webpages, even on the speediest, fatest, computer of them all are dog slow compared to what they should be.
Now some pages are fine but the amount of pigs out there is just plain insane.
I like my desktop to be lean and ultra low latency: I'll have tens of windows (including several browsers) and it's super snappy. Switching from one virtual workspace to another is too quick to see what's happening (it take milliseconds and I do it with a keyboard shortcut: reaching for the mouse is a waste of time).
I know what it means to have a system that feels like it's responding instantly as I do have such a system... Except when I browse the web!
And it's really only some (well, a lot of) sites: people who know what they're doing still come up with amazingly fast websites. But it's the turds: those shipping every package under the sun and calling thousands of micro-services, wasting all the memory available because they know jack shit about computer science, that make the Web a painful experience.
And although I use LLMs daily, I see a big overlap between those having the mindset required to produce such turds and those thinking LLMs are already perfectly fine today to replace devs, so I'm not exactly thrilled about the immediate future of the web.
P.S: before playing the apologists for such turd-sites, remember you're commenting on a very lean website. So there's that.
To put this into another context, today there was a post about Slack's 404 page weighting 50Mb.
Evidently, the entire concept of size & communications efficiency has been abandoned
In accordance with this philosophy, I worked on a project a couple years ago where the HTML home page uncompressed size was intentionally limited to 4k. The idea being a slow network connection (such as a mobile device using a limited cellular connection) would be able to render quickly and remaining content could load asynchronously.
Emphasis mine, and tying with how it opened with the story about the designer who believed accessibility and "good design" are at odds (I'm screaming inside).
Some years ago I made a website again. Screw best practices, I used my systems engineering skills and the browser’s debugger. I had written game engines with soft realtime physics simulations and global illumination over the network. I knew what computers could do. This website would render within 1 frame at 60 FPS without any layout recalculation, garbage collection events, web requests that can’t be parallelized without dependencies etc.
I showed it to friends. They complained it doesn’t work. They didn’t realize that once they clicked, the site displayed the next content instantly (without any weird js tricks). This was a site with a fully responsive and complex looking design. The fact that users are SO used to terrible UX made me realize that I was right about this industry all along as a child.
But, damn, that was some fun stuff. Really challenging to get the graphical results we wanted and keep it under budget (15 KB in the early days).
It's really satisfying.
For tech-inclined: Codeberg/GitLab/GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages
-- Feynman
Suggesting that an application should stay within a 128KB limit is akin to saying I enjoy playing games in polygon mode. Battlezone was impressive in the 90s, but today, it wouldn't meet user expectations.
In my opinion, initial load time is a better measure of performance. It combines both the initial application size and the time to interactivity.
Achieving this is much more complex. There are many strategies to reduce initial load size and improve time to interactivity, such as lazy loading, using a second browser process to run code, or minimizing requests altogether. However, due to this complexity, it's also much easier to make mistakes.
Another reason this is often not done well is that it requires cross-team collaboration and cross-domain knowledge. It necessitates both frontend and backend adjustments, as well as optimisation at the request and response levels. And it is often a non-functional requirement like accessibility that is hard to track for a lot of teams.
Also, you're thinking way too much in a SPA architecture. Using just server side rendering with just a tiny bit of javascript like the article states removes most of the problems you describe like Initial load time and cross team collaboration. The load time of the described websites would be instant, and there is no front end team needed.
Why even make it "reactive"? Just make your site static server-rendered pages? Or just static pages. Is it because additional-content-loading is something users expect?
"Write your site in plain javascript and html. Don't use a framework. Write some minimal css. Bamo. Well under 128kb." ???
I'm reminded of The Website Obesity Crisis, [0] where the author mentions reading an article about web bloat, then noticing that page was not exactly a shining example of lightweight design. He even calls out Medium specifically.
[0] https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm , discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34466910
