Comment by sidewndr46

Ironically these instant starting NT applications were often using COM.

As much as I hated developing with COM, the application interoperability and OLE automation is a form 90s tech utopianism that I miss.

Well, the way in which we got there is in adding more features to the "obvious" answer: all any given site necessarily has to do, to have the same presentation as today, is place pixels on the screen, change the pixels when the user clicks or types things, and persist data somewhere as the user does things.

Except...there's no model of precisely how text is handled or how to re-encode it for e.g. screen reading...the development model lacks the abstraction to do layout...and so on. So we added a longer pipeline with more things to configure, over and over.

But - the computing environment is also different now. We can say, "aha, but OCR exists, GPT exists" and pursue a completely different way of presenting many of those features, where you leverage a higher grade of computing power to make the architectural line between the presentation layer and the database extremely short and weighted towards "user in control of their data and presentation". That still takes engineering and design, but the order of magnitude goes down, allowing complexity to bottleneck elsewhere.

That's the kind of conceptual leap computing has made a few times over history - at first the idea of having the computer itself compile your program from a textual form to machine instructions ("auto-coding") was novel and complex. Nowadays we expect our compilers to make coffee for us.

And don't forget the UX designers armed with their figmas and alikes. The tech-stack is only one among a number of organizational and cultural issues crippling the field.

> But I really wonder - what would be more complex?

> Building interactive programs based on HTML or Logo (if anybody does remember)?

Hold my beer: my Github Actions CI scripts use Logo to generate the bash build scripts as images that are then OCRed and executed by a special terminal that exploits the Turing complete nature of Typescript's type system.

Turtles all the way down!

Here's a fun fact, most fonts have a font program written in a font specific instruction set that requires a virtual machine to run. There is no escaping the VMs!

Virtual machines don't add much overhead.

And then came WASM...

Like GitHub's new code viewer! I have to load the raw text just so I can use Ctrl-F!

Twitter does that and I don't understand why. Do they think their js blob can figure out which divs to render faster than the browser engine itself?

Firefox allows you to use / to start a conventional search.

As a bonus, in Firefox if you hit the ' key (apostrophe) you get a search that looks only within hyperlinks and ignores all the un-clickable plain text. Give it a try, sometimes it can be very useful

You can search with / on Firefox.

Firefox lets you use / for search.

vimium / vimium-ff

Dafuq kind of scale could even a service for lots of restaurants have, that that wouldn't be a single query taking milliseconds to execute? I'd maybe split the last bit (user history re-ordering) into another operation, but the rest, nah, not seeing it, one quick query, probably behind a view.

I mean maybe your DB is a single node running on a potato and your load's very high but you're also somehow never hitting cache, but otherwise... no, there's no good reason for that to be slow.

[EDIT] Your last paragraph is the reason, though: it's made extremely poorly. That'll do it.

None of the things you said mentioned should be hard. We did complicated things like that and more in the 1990s.

But it was different...

Yeah. It was. That's exactly my point.

A major problem is the number of places in our code stacks where developers think it's perfectly normal for things to take 50ms or 500ms that aren't. I am not a performance maniac but I'm always keeping a mental budget in my head for how long things should take, and if something that should be 50us takes 50ms I generally at some point dig in and figure out why. If you don't even realize that something should be snappy you'll never dig into why your accidentally quadratic code is as slow as it is.

Another one I think is ever-increasingly to blame is the much celebrated PHP-esque "fully isolated page", where a given request is generated and then everything is thrown away. It was always a performance disaster, but when you go from 1 request to dozens for the simplest page render it becomes extra catastrophic. A lot of my web sites are a lot faster than my fellow developers expect simply because I reject that as a model for page generation. Things are a lot faster if you're only serving what was actually requested and not starting everything up from scratch.

Relatedly, developers really underestimate precomputation, which is very relevant to your point. Your hypothetical page layout is slow because you waited until the user actually clicked "menu" to start generating all that. Why did you do that? You should have computed that all at login time and have it stored right at your fingertips, because it is a reasonable assumption given the sort of page you're talking about that if the user logged in, they are there to make an order, not to look at their credit card settings. Even if it expensive for reasons out of your control (location API, for instance) if you already did the work you can serve the user instantly.

Having precomputed all this data, you might as well shove it all down to the client and let them manipulate it there with zero further network requests. A menu is a trivial amount of information.

It isn't even like precomputation is hard. It's the same code, just running at a different time.

"But what about when that doesn't work?" Well, you do something else. You've got a huge list of options. I haven't even scratched the surface. This isn't a treatise on how to speed up every conceivable website, this is a cri de coeur to stop making excuses for not even trying, and just try a little.

And it is SO MUCH FUN. Those of you who don't try you have no idea what you are missing out on. It is completely normal on a code base no one has ever profiled before to find a 50ms process and improve it to 50us with just a handful of lines tweaked. It is completely normal to examine a DB query taking 3 seconds and find that with a single ALTER TABLE ADD INDEX cut that down to 2us. This is the most fun I have at work. Give it a try. It's addictive!

I'm a well constructed system, you could probably get this down to one PostGIS query with some joins and spacial indexes that should run in <100ms.

I want to say some webpages actually do this to make you accidentally click on ads but I have no proof.

My guess for this is that the average user doesn't parse text on pages as fast as more tech-savvy users. That delay is perfectly timed for the average user to grab their attention.

For me, I use google so often that I can rapidly parse information without really needing to read much of the text, the link just sort of 'looks' right. I've observed my wife reading google results and she is much slower and more methodical, probably because she doesn't google things 20+ times a day every day like I do.

That's how I end up misclicking, because i'm not working at the speed of a normal googler.

It is really annoying though, there are some css tweaks you can make using browser extensions to make that disappear if you're so inclined.

I really could see Apple adopting an approach from FPS games, where the phone applies a click to what was under your finger 1/4 second-ish instead of what's there when the click is recognized. Time-travel clicking.

But the real solution is better web page design.

you would think they could figured out that programs not directly opened by the user shouldn't be able to steal focus from the program the user is currently interacting with. seems like basic UX/UI failure

Stealing focus should be a misdemeanor!

Unfortunately I don’t have a website for myself and I don’t feel comfortable sharing my client’s websites. I operate purely through word of mouth in my local town, and I don’t have any aspirations to “go big”

I am using uBlock origin, Privacy Badger as well as a PiHole for my personal use.

That's not always an option for a given work environment, however.