[stuhacking]

Actually, I'm wondering what Haskell has to do with any of this at all.

You're comparing the size of the current incarnation of a fairly modern functional programming runtime with the capacity of computers that existed 10 years before the first incarnation was realised...

The only message I can take from that is that programs today are quite big. That's only really interesting from a nostalgic point of view, I don't see what relevance it has to the discussion of mutability?

Of course, I could have missed something obviously significant here...

[stewbrew]

The parent poster was talking about immutability, "the early days" and copying data. I think my point was that you don't have to copy data all the time but this requires a clever interpreter/compiler that you could not have run "in the early days".

I'd also like to use the opportunity to say that I find those OOP vs FP posts at HN rather pointless.