>IMO, that quote's garbage and really "back in my day". Our resources are just more powerful today.
Which is the whole point if the quote. And the "back in my day" is 100% true in the field of programming. Ever heard of Moore's law? Ever tried to program with 8K RAM?
>We still run into performance issues with things like bulk updates and computation times (MapReduce / distributed computing) quite frequently.
Yes, we still run into "performance issues". But with MILLION times the data they ran into performance issues with.
Heck, we can now do a whole computer of the time interpreted in a web browser in Javascript and still get acceptable speed to play games in it.
Nowadays in-browser Javascript is able to execute algorithms in under 1 second that would have taken tens of minutes or hours to compute in the late eighties. Back then, even a dumb spell-checker like that one implemented by Peter Norvig in Python, would have been problematic and was considered a major feat. If a software engineer from the eighties would travel forward in time, he'd be amazed that we are carrying super-computers in our pockets.
You've just fully booted linux in your browser. That Linux sees 16 MB RAM for itself. If you are a web programmer, do you even try to see how much memory the browser spent for this, or any other page you click to?
Which is the whole point if the quote. And the "back in my day" is 100% true in the field of programming. Ever heard of Moore's law? Ever tried to program with 8K RAM?
>We still run into performance issues with things like bulk updates and computation times (MapReduce / distributed computing) quite frequently.
Yes, we still run into "performance issues". But with MILLION times the data they ran into performance issues with.
Heck, we can now do a whole computer of the time interpreted in a web browser in Javascript and still get acceptable speed to play games in it.
Perspective man.