It's interesting how netscape was one among to start the dotcom bubble, and how the breakage of said bubble gave Douglas Crockford some time to read ECMA script standards, and really drove him to write the 'good parts' and JSLint. Which then lead millions of js frameworks to bloom; then node, react, now flutter; and what not!

Time travellers should be really careful not to step on that netscape fly!

I would have liked to see the consequences of a world without that, honestly.

Somehow all these frameworks came into existence, and all of them lack the age old principles of software being lightweight and performant.

Now we have more lines of code in these frameworks then your entire app requires to actually work if you didn't have them.

They are also horribly slow compared to not having them.

Yet, here we are.

@Jilano that could probably mean flash and applets still doing the rounds, and mobile web if exists at all, be much more bloated!

@C0D4 that'd be stereotyping. Not all software created equal. Besides, software need to be only as performant that it enables it's purpose. For example, if they went about writing code for self driving cars only in assembly, so as it stays performant and light; we'd just be hitting breaks all the way for next 100 years or more.

I like to think, It's more about what's best for the job, and what makes things feasible. We need to consider the improvement in hardware which makes lot of manual software optimizations irrelevant.

I keep remembering when my grandad told me he programmed on punch cards and once he got to use a terminal his programs couldn't be any bigger than 72kb.

Then I remeber the industry I work in and think that I have programs that run over multiple machines, sometimes with more than 10,000,000 times the amount of memory than my grandad that are seen as optimal.

But obviously my programs don't solve the same problems as my grandads.