How fast should your computer be?

 Many people are still talking as if computer needs to be faster. I'm curious as to how fast they want their computer to be. The truth is, I would have been perfectly happy with Raspberry Pi Zero W, if only newer programs do not assume that the computer they run on have access to gigabytes of memory.

As Raspberry Pi community shows, it has been quite usable on retro computing emulator. I have been reading a lot of old magazines lately, and what I saw really surprised me. It turns out that a lot of those old computers, by which I mean having less than 64 kilobytes of memory, had a far more ranging application than today's super computer. 

Naturally, they would do it in little pieces, and slow, and extremely cumbersome. However, the application of their uses is wide ranging, and practical. Perusing Raspberry Pi Foundation blogpost, I see very little that interest me. I suppose those applications are cool enough, but what would I do with robots and stuff? It's like nobody is interested in office application anymore. And yet, those are where computer users can do the most good.

It reminds me of the phrase, "That's cool, but what does it do?" In other words, what do you get out of it, other than games?

I do wonder how we get to become this way. I still remember the old Palm Pilot PDA. Compared to WinCE rival of the day, Palm devices are rather underpowered. Yet, they are very convenient to use. That's because the User Interface took into account the slowness of the CPU and changed the program behavior accordingly. For example, all the searches only search the beginning of the word, unlike other searching routines of the time where you can search text in the middle of the word. 

In so many words: What are you using your computer for? I'd rather have a slow, cheap computer with great UI instead of super computer with bad UI. If you design your programs right, you can create a good workflow, and therefore you don't need some super computer to do simple tasks. Sure, the program will look rather ugly, but if all you can afford is some cheap $10 computer and no software, you can still use it to do your daily task.

I have said this before and I will say it again: " You don't need to be a coding Hero, if you know the principles of good Design." When I design my programs, I always consider the cases where the amount of data overwhelm the program. What happens then? This is something that is missing from today's computer programmers. Partly because not many problems will choke super computers nowadays. Partly because, if they do, there's nothing they can do about it, having built their programs with a collection of third party libraries.

Learning to code is more than just writing a program that works. It is also about having a good design, so that the program will be an absolute joy to use. This needs more learning.