[latepaul]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

I call it lazy as well.

I don't call it lazy because you're talking about a company, an organisation that exists to make money. There may be lazy people working for that company but that's not the same thing.

Choosing not to do something because you can't see how it will make more money, is not, for a company, "lazy", it's doing what they do.

It's the same reason I'm always surprised when people call companies "greedy" as if there's an acceptable level of profit at which they should stop trying.

I remember, when I first started working (software development for internet) we had to make pages as small as possible. Bytes were money! Even so that in the HTML, CSS and javascript you removed any non-mandatory space, just to make the file as small as possible.

Later, with the advent of ISDN (paired) and DSL, this became less and less necessary and we became lazy in removing extra lines or cleaning up code (beside what you have to do to keep it managable, naturally).

Later still, even though broadband was the standard, we had to return to the pre-DSL time and make pages as small as possible again: mobile phones. Time was again put in to clean any non-required spaces.

Now, with almost unlimited mobile bundles (at least, on this side of the big pond), developers are getting lazy again, and don't clean their code as they should.

Why "should" though? Are they being paid to write the smallest code possible? If so then "should" applies, if their employers have other priorities then perhaps not.

And yes things change. We do things now we would never have dreamt of in the days of slower CPUs, smaller memory, less storage and restricted bandwidth. And that is entirely appropriate.

Lest we forget the Y2K "bug" was really a space saving optimisation that lasted longer than it should have.

It might be "efficient" on the creator's side: no excess time spent, but most certainly not efficient on the reader's side: larger than required files, which might take longer to process, because of nothing important.

Which was my point. It's more efficient for the creator and the OP was asking why the creator did it. The only reason the creator should care about inefficiency on the reader's side is if it hurts their ability to sell it. Which I doubt it does.