Software Resource Bloat

Hmm, seems like dev resources would be better spent in improving resource consumption as well. I can't imagine why it would need so much.

The resource curse also exists in software. I've seen so many comments that try to justify excessive RAM usage with "RAM is cheap". It's only "cheap" if you don't waste it. Otherwise your consumption will increase to match whatever is available even if the additional value the additional consumption provides is close to zero.

I recently had to upgrade my RAM because I have Spotify and Slack open all the time. Today RAM is cheap but it is crazy those programs take up so much resources.Another program I use a lot is Blender (3D software). Compared to Spotify and Slack it is a crazy complicated program with loads of complicated functionalities. But it starts in a blink and only uses resources when it needs to (calculations and your 3D model).So I absolutely agree with you.I also think it has to do with the fact

It's thinking like that which leads to web page bloat. CPU resources aren't free, especially in an environmental capacity.

Programmer's time is expensive and RAM is cheap. Unless there are problems with memory leaks that cause the app to crash - programmer's time is better spent elsewhere.

The " is cheap" mantra also really only makes sense if you are writing server code, where you yourself pay for all the memory your code will ever use. If you deploy code to a large number of users it makes little sense. If a million users start your app daily, and your app has a 5 second load time and uses 300mb of ram, you are wasting over 50 days of user time, and hogging close to 300 terabytes of ram.

It's ridiculous that we've relied on hardware to save us and that we do more and more every day. We clap our hands at a bit of text and some pictures on a screen taking hundreds or thousands of megabytes of memory. This incredible ineffecincy means that computers cost more than they should, not as many people have them as could, that we spend more resources than necessary to make them and more electricity to run them than we need to. Why don't programmers generally understand how

You're optimizing for the wrong resource.Computers serve humans, not the other way around. That means that unless you're optimizing for something that benefits people, you're probably making things worse.So yeah, if a program is just the same but is twice as slow in a way that harms user experience, then sure, that's bad. But if a program uses twice the CPU but is easier to develop and deploy, that's a win.For example, if somebody uses the technology to make MAM

You forgot performance and resource utilization.

You're comparing apples and oranges.None of the examples you listed (Gmail, Wordpress, Electron, Android) have draconian resource constraints, and developers put a heavy emphasis on shipping new features and ease-of-use. The cost of customers lost due to resource bloat is far lower than engineer hours put into optimization - the reality is that customers simply do not care.For niches that are still constrained, the "quality" you are reffering to is called "efficiency&qu