Comment by dgb23

> Software costs money to build, and performance optimization doesn't come for free.

Neither do caching, operational/architectural overhead, slow builds and all the hoops we jump through in order to satisfy stylistic choices. All of this stuff introduces complexity and often demands specialized expertise on top.

And it's typically not about optimization, but about not doing things that you don't necessarily have to do. A little bit of frugality goes a long way. Often leading to simpler code and fewer dependencies.

The hardware people are (actually) optimizing, trying hard to make computers fast, to a degree that it introduces vulnerabilities (like the apple CPU cache prefetching memory from arrays of pointers, which opened it up for timing attacks, or the branch prediction vulnerability on intel chips). Meanwhile we software people are piling more and more stuff into programs that aren't needed, from software patterns/paradigms to unnecessary dependencies etc.

There's also the issue of programs feeling entitled to resources. When I'm running a video game or a data migration, I obviously want to give it as many resources as possible. But it shouldn't be necessary to provide gigabytes of memory for utility programs and operative applications.