I meant more today’s technology. Where my chat server uses the better part of a gigabyte of RAM, just to forward text messages. Or like any random news site being like 5-10MB, not for the pictures, but because it sends the whole Bootstrap framework, webfonts and additional megabytes of javascript for the image lightboxes and random stuff. And I can’t even realistically use Firefox on my old-old device with 3GB of RAM total. I think a lot of that isn’t due to tradeoffs… Things just got more complex. We rely a lot more on ready-made libraries and helpers. And a lot of it is convenience. You just don’t need to pay attention or put in effort, if it’s available anyways. And I mean people will find some use some ways to fill it up. If there’s space left on the Blueray, game developers add dedicated textures for night scenarios, rainy days, … While their predecessors had to rely on some trickery or it just wasn’t possible.

I usually don’t complain. I just get annoyed when I have to buy new hardware. Or currently with my self-hosted services, and some of the services just taking up a lot of RAM. Some server software uses 1500MB of RAM, and then you find a different project providing the same features, just that it’s written in a different programming language and it’s fine with 300MB. And memory on my VPS is limited. So I ether pay attention to resource usage or I cut down on the number of self-hosted services. (Or pay double the monthly rate.)

The speed/memory tradeoff is something people learn while studying computer science. But I seriously doubt it’s part of the usual programming job. (Unless you’re doing embedded devices or something like that.) It’s more that hardware is cheap while developer time is expensive. And the tradeoff is not to pay attention to efficiency or optimization, but just throw more hardware at it.