An uncanny valley of speed

Moore’s law is dead, long live Moore’s law. In spite of (or is it because of…?) the absolutely absurd progress in personal (and pocketable!) computing power over the last 1 2 3 4 8 decades, and particularly so in the last ~15 years, much of the software we use day to day seems only to be getting slower.

We are well into what I have termed The Age of Bad Software, where perverse incentives (money, what else?) and the aforementioned abundance of available CPU cycles have given rise to a credo of ”just make it work and get it out the door” in software development. Ill-considered, bloated, wasteful code is propagating apace. Eleven years after Marc Andreessen’s landmark essay Software is Eating the World, it looks a lot like it has been Bad Software eating the world.

In the increasingly rare case that we encounter good, respectful, performant software, we’re liable to doubt whether it is in fact working correctly.

Susam describes exceeding his readers’ expectations of plausible web performance, and the confusion that results in Comfort of bloated web.

— Susam Pal, Comfort of bloated web