Then again, I remember when I switched from C++ to Visual Basic and wondered why anyone would bother to develop Windows (3.1!) applications when they ran approximately 100x slower than C/C++ apps. The only thing was that it *seemed” faster to develop in VB, and you could have lots of pretty things at a relatively small time cost. MS are good at targetting the wider, lazier base at the end-product’s expense, and building on top of that. While VB is all but dead now, these efforts all led to C# which is now quite popular.

I imagine a lot of punchcard and assembly programmers feel another generation older when they read these articles. There was a time when memory capacity and processor power was at a premium - but now that it’s not really an issue (computing power seems to have outstripped our average need of it), it’s easy to be complacent about how well your application does what it does. You don’t need under-the-hood elegance anymore (ho ho, right iTunes?).