Ask HN: Was programming more interesting when memory usage was a concern?

I first learned programming in the early 80s, but never took it too seriously until the mid 2000s. I first learned Python at a time when I thought I'd do most of my serious work in Java.

That was a time when Python was rarely someone's first language. People would say, "Try Python, your programs will be about a third as long as they are now!" I was skeptical, but holy heck those people were right.

I am academic enough to enjoy the intellectual challenge of being conscious of memory usage. But when you had to pay attention to it in every project, it was not always fun. It was really fun to use Python and forget about memory for a while. I built many projects in Python that I probably wouldn't have made time for in Java.

I really enjoy programming these days, where you can forget about memory until you have a reason to optimize. Then when you do need to optimize, you can profile your code with fantastic tools, reason about memory enough to get things working efficiently again, and move on with the project. I really enjoy hopping back and forth between focus on a larger project, and focus on the inner workings of a project.

I think we're seeing the same kind of fundamental change with GPT-assisted programming. There's a whole generation starting to use these tools right now who will ask a question on a 2040s version of HN, "Was programming more interesting when correct syntax was a concern?"

I still worry about memory usage every day, and I’m writing Typescript for a single page React app.

Sure, there’s more memory these days and many languages make memory correctness errors a thing of the past, but play your cards wrong and you’ll exhaust your users’ resources just the same. In many ways it’s harder today because you can’t easily look at an abstraction and understand its memory or cache cost in languages like Java, Python, or JavaScript. you just pray it’ll get optimized or won’t cost too much and big-O analysis is enough. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard programmers working with GC languages worry about GC pressure or GC pauses.

You can always work in Zig, C++, Rust, etc to make reasoning about memory use easier. There’s more positions today working in those contexts than in the past, even though they’re a smaller overall percent of the market.

There's still easily enough constraints to be had to make programming interesting.

As a former pascal, C, assembly programmer I learned perl, python, lua and finally type/javascript (when it became decent) and never looked back. It was cool, but not-worth-it-today kind of cool. When I think about cascade-freeing my pointers again or [de]serializing a struct for storage or ffi, I shudder. We digged the same ditches again and again and again.

I was pretty late into it (ca 2000) and can only imagine the pain of switching banks, mapping windows, dealing with segments and overlays, unloading things. When you hear about “cache invalidation and naming things”, don’t you ask yourself what the hell is “cache invalidation”? Lucky you.

There’s so much you can do today in just a few hours. But if you want that feeling, start with npm-remove-ing your bundler. That’s not the same, but the feeling will be the same.

I miss them when hunting bugs.