To me, it's more about no longer needing to think about memory as a scarce resource, something you allocate carefully and manage with great care. There's just .. lots
As much more of a hardware guy myself, I've always been frustrated by this path of thinking. Sure, it's convenient for you as the programmer if you don't have to think about resources, but it always feels like the growth in hardware performance is mostly consumed by more and more needless resource usage.
Always reminds me of how cars are getting more and more efficient, powerful and clean-burning, and yet mpg is only barely creeping upwards.
Alternatively, an anecdote from my father- he was once tasked with upgrading the capacity of a company NAS, which was a few hundred megabytes, that was closing in on max capacity. He arranged to bring on some 20x that capacity, thought "well, this should do the job for a while", and it was filled in a matter of weeks.
As much more of a hardware guy myself, I've always been frustrated by this path of thinking. Sure, it's convenient for you as the programmer if you don't have to think about resources, but it always feels like the growth in hardware performance is mostly consumed by more and more needless resource usage.
Always reminds me of how cars are getting more and more efficient, powerful and clean-burning, and yet mpg is only barely creeping upwards.
Alternatively, an anecdote from my father- he was once tasked with upgrading the capacity of a company NAS, which was a few hundred megabytes, that was closing in on max capacity. He arranged to bring on some 20x that capacity, thought "well, this should do the job for a while", and it was filled in a matter of weeks.