The context of this discussion is about "a high quality text editor".
Of course in the name of not using the same golden hammer for all problems, extremely large systems like the web and text editors should each be considered in their own rights for the best solution for each of those.
I know. But you can also substitute 'long-lived' for 'extremely large', etc. 'People have lost track of the importance of efficiency/performance' is a recurring point of jblow's. There's something to it, no doubt, but I think it also merits some pushback.
I don't think "long-lived" is a good substitute for "extremely large". The longer something lives, the better it should be, for multiple reasons -- more time to work on the code, more design iterations, more-thorough understanding of the problem gained over time. If the code is just getting more messy and decayed and hard-to-deal-with over time, then we are doing something wrong. (And we almost always are).
I'm not just saying that people have lost track of the importance of efficiency. I am saying they've lost track of how to actually do it. I think at least 95% of the programmers working in Silicon Valley have no practical idea of how to make code run fast. Of the remaining 5%, a very small number are actually good at making code run fast. It's a certain thing that you either get or don't. (I didn't really get it when I started in games, even though I thought I did ... it took a while to really learn.)
I think it's a decent substitute because what you say should happen is generally the opposite of what actually does happen, often for reasons other than ineptitude. But more generally, my wanky counter-point is 'you say all these things as if it's a given they're unequivocally bad and it's not at all obvious to me that they are'. There's an awful lot of room above 16ms.
Dude, Photoshop takes many seconds to start up, and as of the most recent redesign it now often takes multiple seconds just to display the new project menu. And this is not atypical of today's software.
Forget 16ms, I would be happy to get to an order of magnitude slower than that for much of today's software ... it would be a massive increase in human happiness.
Of course in the name of not using the same golden hammer for all problems, extremely large systems like the web and text editors should each be considered in their own rights for the best solution for each of those.