LoL.. I knew this one successful independent developer who told me:

"Why do all these companies use inefficient technologies - seriously? What I usually do is: I present myself to a company, I ask them what they would like to happen, what their problem domain is and then I present a solution. A lot of companies I've consulted for were jaw-dropped that an entire efficient and complex system was only a size of 52 KiloBytes because I just used simple languages to accomplish the task".

He has a point.. look at all these companies nowadays forcing you to Java, GlassFish, NodeJS and what not. Just the frameworks and libraries alone hog down 10 minutes of build time (sometimes 30!!), the worst companies using frameworks that require you to rebuild an entire project just to see a change in the UI.. they don't even add a watcher, and even then.. omg, not to mention averaging project file sizes of 100+ MB.

Sigh.. where is the development world going?

Things are kind of weird. It's basic structural engineering to want to tower a stack of something as low as possible, I dunno why so many software engineers want to do the opposite. Also, as much as package managers make my daily life so much easier, it's not normal to have them install 100mb mostly-unused dependencies for a skeleton app. I've almost run out of HD space before for this. In ten years we'll look back on all of this as fucking mental, I hope.

Why they use inefficient tech? Easy. Because they have incompetent dev leads that doesn't want to learn anything new.

Also the idea of independent developer helping a company feels wierd to me. I thinks its a sign of bad management. Even if you have 10 developers employeed, at least one of them should be able to find a solution to any problem. If not, either your whole company sucks that much so you can't even keep your best developers working with you (because of low pay, bad work environment etc.) or you are just working with interns.

Btw efficiency != disk size. Price per gb is really unimportant these days.

Glassfish?! Been years since that was relevant.

I see it from both sides of the coin though, in all honesty. Sometimes it makes sense to just knock something together in a simple language and way too many people stick hundreds of unnecessary dependencies in place in order to achieve it.

Sometimes the heavyweight approach is best though, from a business point of view if nothing else. (Popular language of choice) devs are usually quite easy to come by, and reasonably cheap in the grand scheme of things. If they can knock something together that works reliably and is maintainable, is inefficient but still fulfills the requirements of the task, then the business doesn't care if it's a 500MB package or a 50KB executable. If they disappear, the business can find more devs pretty easily.

Now on the other hand there's devs who could do a much better job technically in a more esoteric language or framework - but that's a big business risk if those devs take off with no-one to replace them.

try writing a global switcher like the infamous dark mode in a "traditional" language like "HTML" and "JavaScript" you will have pain, much pain. Realize that while the "bloated" frameworks like node cover all browser edge cases and OSes. everything that you think you are smarter with, you are not, that's why these frameworks have literally thousands of contributors and have considered nearly edge case you can't even dream to think of.

@fullstackchris your mindset is set on SPA, we don't need SPA. Dark mode is few lines of css, what the need of framework is here ?

no, my mindset is in writing software targeted to any platform. SPA has nothing to do with it

Size doesn't matter, mostly.
Startup time, recompile time, bandwidth, memory usage. These are things to optimize for.

@AlmondSauce There are still companies that use Java 5 and GlassFish.. LoL.

@CaptainRant That doesn't make it relevant, just legacy crap that's still in use 😁