That's a poor comparison. The difference between back then and now is: Back then, no one knew we'd have such an exponential increase in computing power. But we got it. Today, everyone expects that tomorrow will yield an exponential increase in computing power, because that's the way its always been. But that increase isn't coming.
In other words, products back then were never engineered with that exponential increase in mind. Often it just happened, accidentally or because the creators had a large vision that genuinely needed that much memory. Products today, like browser rendering runtimes and by extension Atom, literally are. The problem with writing code engineered ideally for the computers of tomorrow is that, in the realest sense of the word, tomorrow never comes. Today, its "32gb of memory is expensive and rare, but it'll get cheaper." You keep that product development mindset and tomorrow it'll be "64gb of memory is expensive, but it'll get cheaper." Your product will always be slow. Tomorrow never comes.
And it'll take teams like the Chrome team far too long to realize that we're fucking done with exponential increases at an industry level. They're over. Maybe in twenty years we'll get a revolution like memristors or graphene or something, but that shit is not going to be soon. The backend engineering world has already figured this out and moved hard to scale-out instead of scale-up, but the UI world is still caught-up in this pretty little fantasy that, well, you know, the next iPhone will have 6gb of memory so it'll just be a little slow until then.
> Everyone knows Atom uses a lot of memory. At some point in the very near future, it will no longer be important.
My five-year-old Mac has 16 gigs of RAM. I won’t buy another that has less than 32 gigs.
As a counterpoint, my 3 year old laptop has 8GBs if memory, my server 12gb and none of them are maxed.
My next unit won’t have more than 16gbs, because that would be an absolute waste.
Maybe use less Chrome and Chromium/Electron based shit, and you’ll find out how insanely much ram 8GBs actually is?
I know this argument tends to become a bit philosophical, but if (ab)using memory the way that browsers or Electron does means that programs can be written faster, be safer, and can run on more platforms, then is it really being wasted?
Sure, it's not runtime efficient in many cases, but that's not the only thing that matters, and it's pretty far from the top priority for many.
I quite frankly make a ludicrous amount of money doing software development. Spending even $1000 on an upgrade to my machine that makes me 1% more productive would end up paying for itself in less than a year.
For me, RAM isn't something I worry about, I have 32GB in this system and i'm not anywhere near maxing it out at my current day job (and for what it's worth, my atom instance that i've had open for about 3 days now is taking up a combined 432mb of memory at this moment, Android Studio is sucking down a whopping 1.5 GB. In my experience the "ram usage" of Electron is blown wildly out of proportion, it's really not that bad to be honest). Atom makes me more productive, so I use Atom, and the memory usage could greatly increase and it wouldn't impact me at all.
Some people work differently, they either aren't as fortunate as I am and can't afford the fancy hardware (or can afford it but simply don't want to buy it, which is okay!), or just prefer working in an environment which starts up faster or uses less resources, or anything else. For them there are other editors, other IDEs, other software they can use.
None of them are objectively "bad" or wrong, they just prioritise different things.
This can go the other way too => People kept complaining about Internet Explorer for years. Then one day better alternatives showed up (Firefox, Chrome) and dealing with sub-par experiences was no longer a necessity.
People complained about the lack of functionality in IE. Atom is functional and iterating fast.
It works great on my 5 year old Mac Book Pro with 16 GB. I understand that some people do have more minimal hardware, but 16GB looks like a $100 investment. Performance and memory usage are being addressed.
I simply see memory usage as less of a problem in 2018/2019. I want more functionality.
Everyone knows Atom uses a lot of memory. At some point in the very near future, it will no longer be important.
My five-year-old Mac has 16 gigs of RAM. I won’t buy another that has less than 32 gigs.