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Comment by legulere | Hacker News Reader

Optimizing software costs developer time, so it’s only done when needed.

So its about core values, it’s about principles. It’s because people focus on something else than craftsmanship and creating great things.

Obviously, it’s because of how our society and culture is oriented. But I’d like to see that change.

You can put almost infinitely much effort into optimization. When do you stop? Do you test every user-interaction takes less than 100 ms below which it can be considered good?

I would hope so actually: someone needs to test every user interaction at least once, at which point we can notice if it's too slow.

It’s not as easy as that. What’s acceptable in test might not be acceptable in your customers conditions. It’s difficult to correctly measure the time for every interaction and humans are extremely bad at telling you how fast something is. Then you also have the problems of regressions that stem from other unrelated changes.

I believe it can be made easy, if you have an easy way to profile your GUI. Test the feature, get a timer. If it took more than 20ms on your killer test machine, it might be too slow for some users. (Adjust your heuristic with the context of your application of course.)

Most devs would love to focus on craftmanship and creating great things.

Most customers want their immediate problem solved as cheaply as possible.

Unless you're in a market where customer's pay for craftsmanship, you will get undersold.

It’s a cultural thing and cultures can and do change.

I don't fully buy this argument. The bloat we see in many systems ends up slowing down development in the long run.

Well defined interfaces and good composition support the goals of the author of lean software.

They also happen to improve developer comprehension and reusability, both of which speed up software development in the long run.

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