>"Math for dummies" book writers don't argue that mathematicians are stupid/incompetent because they do not spend enough time on the basics.
His argument isn't that they don't spend enough time on the basics. His argument is that they don't know the basics even exist.
This is true in my experience. I've interviewed scores of candidates over the years who just have absolutely no mental model of what is going on under whatever abstraction layer they generally work in.
Making trade offs to sacrifice performance for things like developer speed is fine. But if you're not aware you are making those trade offs, I might not call you stupid, but I will call you ignorant.
>Every. Single. Software I use is bloated, I am unaware of any software solely consuming that it should, nothing is close to the theoretical limit, this is not a knowledge issue.
It's not binary. There's a continuum. No software is ever going to use exactly the minimum theoretically possible number of instructions and memory over the entire program.
But some software is worse and some is better.
It is possible to believe that the problem can be solved by changing the culture, while simultaneously believing that you aren't going to be able to completely change the culture. While also believing that you can shift the culture ever so slightly such that you make it just a little bit better.
You can also hold all of the above beliefs while believing that there is a systemic underlying issue that you have no idea how to solve.
From my observations (having watched a good bit of early handmade hero and a good bit of his paid course) the above is pretty close to his beliefs.
It's also fairly close to my own thoughts on the subject. The underlying issue is that software is an industry that primarily competes on features, not quality. I think the reasons for that are numerous--everything from software being an immature industry, to the distorting effects of cheap money flowing into the industry from the previous few decades.
I believe this will work itself out to some degree over time as the industry becomes more mature and we start to see more diminishing returns for just adding new features. Developers will start to look towards other things to differentiate themselves and quality/performance could be one of them.
I don't think there's anything I or Casey can do to change the market dynamics, and I can't think of a technical fix to this issue. I suspect Casey can't either.
I also think that there are niches today where performance and quality can outcompete more features.
Given all the above, I think pushing to convince a small percentage of people that spending a bit more time thinking about performance is a rational goal. Maybe it's the best you can do. But maybe you end up with just a few less wasted cycles in the world. Maybe you end up with a few more pieces of software that feel snappy and pleasant to use than you otherwise would have.