[pmoriarty]

"Yes, Emacs stands for "eight megabytes and constantly swapping". How silly this sounds today. I wonder why do those people even care."

Well, because if an application you're using is constantly swapping, it'll slow that application down to a crawl. This was especially true back in the day when disk was slow (and expensive.. as was RAM).

People today are used to being awash in resources. RAM is fast, plentiful, and cheap. Disks are relatively fast and cheap.

You have to imagine what it was like to live in a resource-constrained environment where you actually had to care about how much memory and disk you used, and how you were using it. These decisions had severe, immediately apparent practical consequences.

[outworlder]

Sorry, I wasn't clear enough.

What I meant to say was that "eight megabytes" sounds silly today. Who cares if an app uses 8MB today? The extrapolation is that it will be the same for Atom or other editors (I'd argue that it already is).

I created my first programs with a computer which had exactly 28815 bytes free when it booted up (out of a possible 64k). If you plugged in a floppy drive, the free memory dropped further.

So, I do understand resource constraints.

Btw,