[vidarh]

There is waste that is fine, and there's waste that doesn't really come with an upside.

E.g. in "waste" that is fine, I'd categorise AmigaE's choice to read the entire source file into memory, instead of doing IO character by character, or line by line from small buffers. It was a recognition that there was no compelling reason to not sacrifice that small amount of RAM for simplicity and speed. What you gain can differ, but as long as the benefit is proportionally good enough relative to the cost, that's fine.

But so much modern software pulls in huge dependencies for very little benefit, or try to be far too much, instead of being focused tools that interoperate well.

It's not so much that the new generation is stupid, as that a lot of people (of any generation) always choose the easy option instead of stopping to think. Sometimes that's the right tradeoff, often it's not.

And hardware advances mean you can get away with more and more. Sometimes that justifies more extravagant resource use. Often it doesn't.

[zozbot234]

> in "waste" that is fine, I'd categorise AmigaE's choice to read the entire source file into memory, instead of doing IO

This is only an issue if your OS doesn't have virtual memory and mmap. Modern OS's automatically prefetch files into free RAM (so there's no such thing as "free RAM is wasted RAM" either). I think newer versions of Amiga OS were supposed to be getting virtual memory support at some point, too.

[vidarh]

Yes, but because it was an issue, even now decades later a lot of compilers still use file IO instead of just reading a file in one go even when you gain benefits (e.g. no "ungetting" or building a token buffer - just keep the index of the start and end). I'm guilty of that myself.

It was an inspired choice, and about 30 years on it's still underutilized, on machines that typically have 3-4 orders of magnitude more RAM.