Ah, that’s efficiency of use and depends more on how familiar you are with the software as well as the design and task. Like editing an image or video is going to be a lot easier with a gui than a command line interface (other than generating slop I guess).
When people talk about how efficient software is, it’s usually referring more to the amount of resources it uses (including time) to run its processes.
Eg an electron app is running a browser that is manipulating and rendering html elements running JavaScript (or other scripts/semi-compiled code). There is an interpreter that needs to process whatever code it is to do the manipulation and then an html renderer to turn that into an image to display on the screen. The interpreter and renderer run as machine code on the CPU, interacting with the window manager and the kernel.
A native app doesn’t bother with the interpreter and html renderer and itself runs as machine code on the CPU and interacts with the window manager and kernel. This saves a bunch of memory, since there isn’t an intermediate html state that needs to be stored, and time by cutting out the interpreter and html render steps.
I know. That is why I started my statement by stating that I don’t like the framing. It treats “efficiency” as the point of software. As the thing, that we should care about when judging software.
But it isn’t. It is user experience. And yes, efficiency is part of that. Both, efficiency in execution and efficiency of use.
And the user experience has improved a lot (ignoring intentional anti patterns to exploit the user that are fairly common, but i think we can agree to ignore that for the sake of the conversation)
Ah, that’s efficiency of use and depends more on how familiar you are with the software as well as the design and task. Like editing an image or video is going to be a lot easier with a gui than a command line interface (other than generating slop I guess).
When people talk about how efficient software is, it’s usually referring more to the amount of resources it uses (including time) to run its processes.
Eg an electron app is running a browser that is manipulating and rendering html elements running JavaScript (or other scripts/semi-compiled code). There is an interpreter that needs to process whatever code it is to do the manipulation and then an html renderer to turn that into an image to display on the screen. The interpreter and renderer run as machine code on the CPU, interacting with the window manager and the kernel.
A native app doesn’t bother with the interpreter and html renderer and itself runs as machine code on the CPU and interacts with the window manager and kernel. This saves a bunch of memory, since there isn’t an intermediate html state that needs to be stored, and time by cutting out the interpreter and html render steps.
I know. That is why I started my statement by stating that I don’t like the framing. It treats “efficiency” as the point of software. As the thing, that we should care about when judging software.
But it isn’t. It is user experience. And yes, efficiency is part of that. Both, efficiency in execution and efficiency of use.
And the user experience has improved a lot (ignoring intentional anti patterns to exploit the user that are fairly common, but i think we can agree to ignore that for the sake of the conversation)