We’re approaching the limits of computer power – we need new programmers

Meaning there's no point in optimizing an expensive function if 99% of your program's memory and run time is spent in a different function.

This means the absolute most important skill to writing efficient software is not assembly language skills, but profiling so you know where to focus your efforts in the first place.

I'll also reminiscence a bit: back in 2000s, my 266MHz, 64MB, 4.1GB HDD PC would let me install a 2GB full feature third person adventure game(Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, for exampler) worth nearly double digit hours of play, currently it takes 2x of disk space to install a basic platformer giving 1-2h of fun. Every new game lags to hell on a new PC because I have opted for 1 year old GFX card. I can view a PDF nicely with SumatrPDF yet Adobe Acrobat Reader takes 3-digit MB to offer same feature & 5x more time to start. I could use IRC in 2000s while Slack takes all of my RAM available. A website back in days would be few kB, I mean people here frequently compare HN with Jira or how funny it is that Netflix has to spend engineering effort to improve time-to-first-render on it's landing page which is static!

Those are facts, not so good: Soul Reaver vs Assassin's Creed is bad idea, because people didn't mind if grass was just flat texture or hero looked like walking cubes. SumatraPDF can open a PDF but Adobe Reader gives me annotation, form filling, signing etc. NFS2 was just racing, NFS:Heat players demand customizing exhaust gas color. Netflix home page loads more images combined than "back in days" and must adapt to big or small screens so it looks great everywhere. Jira lets me drag-n-drop a ticket while it took x3 time to update same ticket back in days in several form refreshes. HN is the simplest CRUD, it just lets me vote and post basic text, heck it delegated search to algolia(a different service)! The features Slack offers will require 5-7 extra different services if I were to use IRC.

But those kinds of reality don't get posts up-voted, so instead they are always like ranting about why Whatsapp needs more resources than the SMS app when both lets me send text to someone else?

Anyways, things change over time, in 2000s, my PC would lag if I opened MSWord & had windows Media player playing some HD videos or a game would crash if I tabbed out of it to check something. But now I have 20+ tabs open that live update stock tickers and have texts infested with hundreds of advert monitoring things while a tiny window plays current news in corner while am typing away happily in IntelliJ IDE, and have a ML model training in background. Now I can also record a HD version of my gameplay and tab out too. I think, in future complex development will take place in the cloud, we'll probably have high speed internet everywhere and online IDE or similar so everything happens in cloud. Similarly how 4GB HDD costed a fortune in 2000s but same price gets me a x100 capacity now, cloud resources will improve while prices will go down. :)

I kind of disagree with this based on intuition alone. Most developers, professional developers, are using web tech (JS stack in particular - Node and hyped front-end frameworks). Yet we"re seeing "interest" in compiled languages such as Rust, despite almost nobody using it professionally and almost nobody doing much with it outside of simple proof of concepts.

To me it points toward a developing sense of insecurity in modern professional developers that simply being a JS dev isn't really programming/development and they've to "prove" themselves with lower level tech.

Something that indicates that, for me, is in StackOverflow's 2019 survey [0] the most used tech was JS and that which surrounds it, followed by Python and other easy-to-get-going-well-supported tech. Yet the "Most Loved" was Rust.

I could be wrong, and I'm open to being, but I intuitively I don't believe the interest in performant technologies is in the face of the sheer bloat we've seen, particularly from the web-front.

>Programmer skill will become more important in the future.

My prediction on this, not so AI specific, is that developing and deploying web-tech will continue to become easier and easier, meaning it'll take less people to do it. Sure, work may arise from developing countries/economies to supplant a drop in demand for it in the developed world, but maybe not.

Combined with a potential bubble burst in tech, I think those relying on web dev for a living could be in trouble in the coming decade.

I don't foresee much in terms of companies trying to optimize operational costs by instructing their devs to write their code more efficiently with memory/performance in mind to reduce operating costs, and thus spur a push toward jumping on compiled languages. If anything, cloud computing will continue to get cheaper and cheaper as the big 3 continue to try and absorb as much marketshare as possible.

[0] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#overview