I think the sacrifice is worth it. Frameworks and ever growing abstractions mean more people with less experience can implement more ideas faster. We get faster iterations which means more features that help real people get stuff done.
This trend actually helps more people than ever use computers for an ever growing array of purposes. Back in the good old days you had to hire developers from a very small group of qualified individuals and then have them spend months on optimizing new code they just wrote instead of using an existing framework. Today you can just read a tutorial online and create a usable POC yourself. This opens so many doors to both developers and new users.
The resource heavy UI practices actually attract more users. Average users don't want dense console UIs or old fashioned native Windows forms. They want a touch app on their mobile that just works. All the tools we have today allow easily sharing and customizing UI components. This in turn fuels fast iteration and improvement of UI so that actual users actually want to use it.
All this doesn't mean you have to be lazy and just freely consume as many resources as you can. It also doesn't mean you shouldn't shame applications for being slow (I'm looking at you Slack for desktop...) or resource hungry like the examples in the article. But overall I think we are definitely going in the right direction.
Comments
I think the sacrifice is worth it. Frameworks and ever growing abstractions mean more people with less experience can implement more ideas faster. We get faster iterations which means more features that help real people get stuff done.
This trend actually helps more people than ever use computers for an ever growing array of purposes. Back in the good old days you had to hire developers from a very small group of qualified individuals and then have them spend months on optimizing new code they just wrote instead of using an existing framework. Today you can just read a tutorial online and create a usable POC yourself. This opens so many doors to both developers and new users.
The resource heavy UI practices actually attract more users. Average users don't want dense console UIs or old fashioned native Windows forms. They want a touch app on their mobile that just works. All the tools we have today allow easily sharing and customizing UI components. This in turn fuels fast iteration and improvement of UI so that actual users actually want to use it.
All this doesn't mean you have to be lazy and just freely consume as many resources as you can. It also doesn't mean you shouldn't shame applications for being slow (I'm looking at you Slack for desktop...) or resource hungry like the examples in the article. But overall I think we are definitely going in the right direction.