It should be light. It should keep its word. It should be quiet.
I started building tools for a living, and it gave me a habit. When something I use annoys me, I follow the annoyance all the way down to find out where it comes from. After a few years of following, my standard for choosing a tool came down to three lines. It should be light. It should keep its word. It should be quiet.
First, it should be light.
Software is a strange industry. Every other branch of engineering evolves toward doing the same job with less material. Software alone runs backwards. A notepad eats hundreds of megabytes. A chat app outweighs a video game. Each new version makes the feature list longer and the tool duller. The app that once opened instantly now makes you wait for it to boot.
Aircraft designers have a saying. Perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. When a thing has to fly, every gram is expensive, so they cut with real urgency. In software, weight looks free, so nobody cuts. But the weight is not free. It is paid for every day, a little at a time, out of the user's memory, battery, and waiting.
