[bluGill]

In turn though, the thinking needed to handle non-flat memory is a complexity that most programmers cannot handle - and even those who could probably should spend their brain power on the complex parts of their program not managing memory. Best to leave that hard part to a few experts instead of make everyone understand it.

The above is very similar to the argument that you should use a garbage collected langauge.

[trollbridge]

Anyone writing an algorithm that needs to be high speed has to start thinking about caches and so forth. So it’s not exactly obsolete.

Back in 1980 most programs were being written in interpreted languages that did all the hard work of memory for you - just like today.