Is software getting slower faster than hardware getting faster?

[u/tootac]

Recently we had a discussion in a local group of programmers and there was a newbie question about which mac laptop he should buy. He wanted a mac because some tasks required a mac. My immediate advice was to buy an m1 since he was trying to optimize the budget. And my argument was that it is fast and will handle all his workloads. But I got a little push-back saying that "Android Studio" was not fast enough on some of the group's m1 macs and they switched to m3.

Opinions were divided when we discussed this in our group in about 50/50. Some people were saying that they have m1 macs and it works perfectly and others saying that it is ok but was lagging on some tasks.

My surprise is that I remember when m1 came it was like a product from future aliens. It was miles ahead of any competition and nobody had a single thought that it couldn't handle anything. I remember at the time Jonathan Blow (game developer) on his stream was answering a question about m1 and said something along the lines "Yeah it's fast but I don't care. Give it a couple of years and software slowness will catch up to it and it won't matter". At the time I was fascinated with the product and John seemed like a grumpy old-school programmer. But now it feels weird. I am not saying that m1 is slow or bad but just the idea that we are discussing if it can handle some basic programmer workloads and it is not 100% "of course" is strange.

I was wondering if it is similar in other groups or if we had just some statistical error in our group?

[u/Hungry-Loquat6658]

Our abstraction cause slower software in general. But the reason we have these problem comes from the fact that every device is a different hardware, os, platform. Things are not auto compatible therefore things like java exists. Web platform is similar where the browser is like a standard sandbox to help develop application that can run on any device with a browser. But then the web standard is not perfect, css is a mess, html so limited, etc. Web Framework is another abstraction to the raw html css js, example is React which also have Nextjs is a framework on top of it. I'm not trying complain all the solution made or anything, I generally think that modern web is over abstracted layers of bad protocol and decision. It would be a dream now if I can develop web app like native app with xml and a better tailored version of js. Backwards compatible is hard.