Essay — No. 142
On slow software
The programs we keep for decades are quiet, a little stubborn and never in a hurry. What they know that the rest of our tools forgot.
Every program I love does one thing, slowly and well. It opens without a spinner, forgets nothing I told it, and has never once asked me to rate my experience.
I have been thinking about why. The calendar I use was written in 1998 by one person in Graz.1 It has had four updates since I installed it. None of them moved a button.
Most of what lives on my phone is the opposite. It is fast in the way a waiter is fast when he wants the table back: attentive, eager, and gone the moment you need him.
Patience is a feature
Slow software is not slow to use. It is slow to change. It treats the habits you built around it as something worth protecting, and it assumes you will still be here next year.
Software should be a place you visit, not a place that visits you.
That is the whole argument, really. The rest of this letter is examples — seven of them, from a text editor to a kitchen timer — and one confession about a to-do app I abandoned three times.2
If there is a lesson, it is an old one from the print shop: make the thing well, then leave it alone long enough for people to love it.
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