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Speed is relevant for some use cases, sure, but not at all for a ton of others. Memory, disk and CPU are almost free in this new world, so why are we computing like it's 1990 still? It's time for some different abstractions than file -> process -> file.

The vast productivity gains of Smalltalk and Lisp were because they discarded those abstractions and programmers were free for others.

Presumably OP posted this after noticing Phantom came up a few days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30807668




> Memory, disk and CPU are almost free in this new world, so why are we computing like it's 1990 still?

Elsewhere on this very site you'll find no ends of complaints about, say, Electron apps.


For general purpose computing applications expand to fill the performance available (that includes real value and bloat!)

I dabble in microcontrollers for fun and there it's different. I am an AVR-8 fanatic and sometimes I think "this is so fast" and "2K of RAM is plenty" and "I can fit CRC-32 tables in 32k of flash because that's what counts as an 'operating system' for me"

Then there are the applications where it just doesn't have the power and I am so glad to have a box of RP2040's because in 2022 the most important attribute of a microcontroller is that it is available.




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