Back in the day they did some amazing things with a limited amount of space
Exactly.
When you’ve only got 4K of memory to play with, you become incredibly creative.
Now, with bazillions of bytes to play with, programming becomes quite sloppy and wasteful.
It’s frustrating that the faster computers get, the slower they seem to work.
Ain't that the truth?
Now, with bazillions of bytes to play with, programming becomes quite sloppy and wasteful.
One of the things that hurts is the attitude of acceptance for "quick and dirty".
Granted there are good things that you can do with more memory (i.e. full debug symbols, more expressive data-structures, etc).
IMO, we're quickly approaching a point where an formally proved and verified OS (and compiler) are needs, not wants… but that's directly antithetical to the mindset put forward in large portions of "the industry" (i.e. web-site programming).