[sowbug]

It's your right as a consumer to have a pro-consumption attitude, because you're spending your own money. Be thrifty. Be profligate. You choose.

But having it as a developer is a different matter. That "powerful machine's resources" aren't yours. They belong to your customer, and it isn't your business what your customer is doing with the computing power your program isn't using.

Writing programs that demand more resources than necessary forces people to discard and replace otherwise perfectly good computers. Which, again, you as the developer don't have to pay for.

If tragedies of the commons don't bug you, then none of this matters. But if they do, then imagine millions of people ordering millions of cardboard boxes from Amazon containing millions of sticks of DRAM to run that O(n^4) loop that you're about to check in.

[jjfoooo4]

I can sympathize with this attitude with things like a Slack clients, which are designed to run in the background, and which developers probably don’t have much choice over.

But there are plenty of lightweight IDE options. IntelliJ competes to be the most powerful IDE available. That implies using lots of compute resources for productivity gains that might be marginal or not even realized by all devs.