How do hardware resources affect the mindset of programmers?
Brian: Having more hardware resources is almost always a good thing–it means, for example, that one doesn’t have to worry much about memory management, which used to be an infinite pain and source of errors 20 or 30 years ago (and certainly was when we were writing AWK). It means that one can use potentially inefficient code, especially general-purpose libraries, because runtime is not nearly as much of an issue as it was 20 or 30 years ago. For example, I think nothing today of running AWK over 10 or even 100 MB files, which would have been very unlikely long ago. As processors continue to get faster and memory capacities rise, it’s easier to do quick experiments and even write production code in interpreted languages (like AWK) that would not have been feasible a few decades ago. All of this is a great win. At the same time, the ready availability of resources often leads to very bloated designs and implementations, systems that could be faster and easier to use if a bit more restra
