Hardware has never been better, but it isn't a licence for code bloat

My iPhone 6 recently upgraded itself to iOS 11. And guess what – it's become noticeably slower. This is no surprise, of course, as it's the same on every platform known to man. The new version is slower than the old.

I believe that one overriding reason for the latter is fairly simple: there's no longer a compulsion to write super-efficient code. These days we measure computer RAM in gigabytes, not kilobytes, and CPU clock speeds are in gigahertz, not megahertz. So back in the day you had to write code incredibly defensively if you were to make it work on the hideously constrained hardware available. Algorithms had to be elegant: processors were so slow that a brute-force algorithm just wasn't really an option, and with tiny amounts of RAM you had to be fastidious with data structures.