If C= had produced an Amiga incompatible wonder computer would you have bought it?

[Merax]

See, I get the desire for more capacity and CPU horsepower. Really, I do. What I don't get is how you can understand that software used to be coded efficiently so as to run at all on far less powerful hardware, and yet think that not only is it acceptable that it's now sloppy and bloated, but it doesn't matter!?

He's right though, in most cases it doesn't matter.  Time to completion and minimizing bugs is more important.  

As a developer, I love small efficient systems and fast, elegant code.  In fact I spend more time on that than I should in my hobby projects.  However, at work, getting things done in a reasonable amount of time means I'm going to be using high level languages, abstraction layers, APIs, and bloated third party libraries in order to get a complex product done in a reasonable amount of time.   All that stuff takes space on your hard drive

My boss and customers don't care if the resulting .exe file is 8 MB instead of 800 KB or if it takes 10 ms instead of 1 ms to finish an operation.  It's not worth doubling or tripling the development time for that.

[Merax]

Yeah, certainly there are practical considerations - it's just the notion of "oh, good coding and optimization mean absolutely nothing now that we have fast CPUs and lots of RAM" that irks me.

Same here, emotionally it seems like a waste.  Maybe someday in the future when the exponential increases stop and software becomes more mature then the next best way to improve it will again be to optimize for speed, memory, and disk usage.

Franko - I agree with you, the extreme frugality when using computer resources was/is necessary on older systems like the Amiga.  I was just trying to defend my profession a bit to say that modern bloat isn't necessarily sloppiness but rather the result of shifting priorities that resulted from the faster hardware being available.

If the software industry had held on to the "Amiga way", we may have slightly snappier OS's and more free hard drive space now,  but there would be whole classes of applications that people currently enjoy that wouldn't be possible to write like that.  Ironically, modern 3D games would be one of those.