Originally Posted by
anotherthing
As computers get faster, programmers get lazier.
No we don't! We get more efficient, instead.
For example, I'm currently working on something that is going to leave several megabytes of data hanging around in memory. No big deal, and if the memory is wanted for something else the operating system will make much better decisions about swapping it out than I can (because it knows stuff I can't know, like what the other applications are up to at the time).
However a couple of decades ago there's no way I'd have designed it like that! I'd have spent extra time - which would probably have been weeks - on careful encoding and caching and avoiding duplication and copying and hand-crafting disk swapping and all sorts of guff, as well as counting CPU cycles.
So, by me being "lazy" my client gets his system a few weeks sooner; he gets to pay me a few grand less; and all for the cost of about 37p worth of memory. This isn't "lazy", is providing a cost effective service to my client.