"We don't know how to program anymore"

Some weeks ago a co-worker was telling us that we (including himself) don't know how to program anymore. We have got used to having plenty of memory, hard disk space... we don't think about the resources anymore. He was saying how in the old good times, people like Brian Kernighan, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie really had to care about these issues. This made them think of efficient algorithms to handle the data to be processed.

I think my colleague was right. The hardware gets faster and faster but the programs eat more and more resources, giving the users always the same feeling: frustration. Imagine you want to edit a huge text file with your favorite text editor, it is very likely that it will become unresponsive.

We don't normally develop having performance in mind, we might not think what if the data to be processed gets 1000 times bigger. We will think that our program works pretty smooth until the data to be processed exceeds what we had initially thought, our program will sweat and we will have a frustrated user.

We have to think of scalability and of resource usage. These things are pretty difficult nowadays as most of the times we are developing on top of many software layers, giving us the feeling we are working on an abstract machine with unlimited resources.

Hardware is more powerful than yesterday but, the volume of data to be processed also increases, so it is always a good thing to think twice which data structures and algorithms to use.

P.S. [by Francisco Perez-Sorrosal] I've just found a recent blog entry that is somehow related to this one.