How has an increase in system complexity affected new programmers?
Found on Ars Technica on Saturday, 19 April 2014
Making a memory-efficient program was required 40/50 years ago because there wasn't enough memory and it was expensive, so most programmers paid close attention to data types and how the instructions would be handled by the processor. Nowadays, some might argue that due to increased processing power and available memory, those concerns aren't a priority.
That's exactly the reason why we have printer drivers which are over 100MB in size, or mainstream software which requires half your disk space to display a pdf or open a spreadsheet. It's true that software these days is more powerful than it was decades ago, but compared to the efficiency of the code, it's mostly turned into bloatware. Today, marketing will tell you that you need a more powerful machine because they pay more attention to a quick release than to efficiency.