Clay_Allison wrote:
It's no secret that modern programming is normaly disgustingly wasteful. Programmers are saving time by using old macros built on old macros built on old macros rather than programming from the ground up. The result is RAM-hogging monsters like the current windows-OS family.
If programmers wrote their own code from the beginning, to do exactly what it is supposed to do, we honestly wouldn't need half the memory we do now.
Remember the famous Bill Gates quote about how he didn't think anyone would need more than 56k of RAM or something ridiculous? Underestimating growth is only half of it. Lazy programming is the other half.
I'm not quite sure what that has to do with these programs, also:
Bill Gates wrote:
* 640K ought to be enough for anybody.
o Often attributed to Gates in 1981. Gates considered the IBM PC's 640kB program memory a significant breakthrough and was surprised at how quickly it became a problem,[1] but he has denied saying that programs would never need more than 640kB.
I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time... I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again.
Have you run any of these demos?
The only efficiency they have is disk space. They eat ram, they eat CPU, they make your video card attempt to kill itself. Some of these demoscene items even allow you to output the textures to disk beforehand to stop the minute+ load time.
Yes, lazy programmers make crappy code (disclaimer: I do QA, kill me now), and good programmers make some really nice code. The problem in today's market is threefold:
1) The product should have been on the market yesterday.
2) Ooh, new, shiny, GIVE ME A BUDGET TO TRY it
which leads to
3) Management: Why aren't you using the stuff we gave you a budget for? Did you make a bad decision? Should we fire you now?
In the end, it comes down to economics, which is cheaper?
R&D
Coding
Testing
RAM, Disk Space, CPU Time?