Why is the Mac so slow?

[Info-Mac]

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From: info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac)
Newsgroups: fa.info-mac
Subject: Why is the Mac so slow?
Message-ID:
Date: Mon, 26-Nov-84 02:52:36 EST
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.2323
Posted: Mon Nov 26 02:52:36 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 28-Nov-84 03:33:15 EST
Sender: yenbut@uw-beave
Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
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From: Mike Caplinger
I really like my Macintosh, but as I use it I find myself wondering
more and more why the Mac is so SLOW. I recently used an IBM PC with
Turbo Pascal (I was forced) and was very impressed with its blinding
compilation speed. Contrast that with MacPascal, where trying to run
the program whirrs the disk for a few seconds, thinks about it some
more, and then starts execution. This is just an example; all
applications have some operation which takes a long time. And
switching between applications is PAINFULLY slow.

I don't really understand this. With a large chunk of the system in
ROM and 128K of memory, I would think that programs would talk to the
disk much less frequently than they seem to. I understand about
resource files, purgable segments, etc, but the end result is really
very slow compared to an MS-DOS or even a CP/M system.

I surely don't want to go back to CP/M (and the tty user interface that
implies), but is there really a reason for Macintosh programs to be
such dogs starting up, closing down, and doing non-trivial computation?
Is this situation ever going to change? Or do programmers just get
correspondingly lazy when given a faster machine with more memory?