[thewebcount]

I don't think this article is seeing the whole picture. The author talks about how programmers used to have to cram a program into 16KB of RAM (or ROM) and it had to be efficient. But that came at a huge cost. Reading 6502 Assembly with variables that could only have up to 6 characters for their names, and were all global was a huge pain in the ass!

We have great optimization tools freely available these days, and when necessary they are used. We also have great standard libraries with most languages that make it fairly easy to choose the right types of containers and other data structures. (You can still screw it up if you want, though.)

As soon as it becomes economically necessary to write more efficient code, we will be tasked with that. I work on professional software and we do a hell of a lot of optimization. Some of it is hard, but a lot of it could be done by regular programmers if they were taught how to use the tools.