You Can Get Work Done With Lean Software
Up until 2020 I never had a computer with more than 2 GB of RAM. It wasn't to "make a point", it's just that 1-2 GB of RAM tends to be enough for me.
I will not change my mind about this. I still use some computers with 2 GB of RAM. They serve particular purposes and have served those purposes for well over a decade.
The other day we published: More Than a Million Bytes Should be Enough for Most Computer Programs
Shortly afterwards we showed that Microsoft's notepad now takes as much as 32 MB of RAM (in Vista 11). That's about 20 times more than GNU Nano, which has vastly more functionality than notepad.
This means that development isn't done right, put aside rants about Electron and Rust (which by the way causes memory-related vulnerabilities in Linux already!).
Software development is under attack. Programming, tell us people who never wrote any computer program, needs to be replaced by chatbots that cause catastrophes to happen. Bloated programs are a way to sell more PCs (while poor-shaming those who don't). Now that prices of RAM increase significantly they make no effort to make things leaner. Instead they shame people into trying "AI" and insult them if they don't.
This isn't an industry built around science. It's geared towards excessive consumption. █