[gorjusborg]

There is some truth to the idea that developer time is expensive, and can dwarf the monetary gains gotten through micro-optimization.

I agree that some people took the idea to mean "what's a profiler?" and that is why our modern machines still feel sluggish despite being mind-bogglingly fast.

[rbanffy]

This might be driven by the cost per computation being vastly lower while the benefit having remained mostly constant. There is little incentive for making a text editor that runs in 10k of memory because there is no benefit compared to one that runs in 10 megabytes or, soon, 10 gigabytes.

I spend a lot of my day in VScode and PyCharm and the compute resources I consume in an hour are more than what the Apollo program consumed over its full existence. Our collective consumption at any given decade is most likely larger than the sum of computing resources consumed up until that point in our history.