> Back then it made a huge difference but now that modern computers have hundreds or even thousands of kilobytes of RAM free it's a bit pointless.
Jokes on you, now I'm running IntelliJ, DataGrip, Firefox, and Slack and thousands of kilobytes of RAM free is a rare sight to see.
they are really just doing us all a service, to remind us of the roots of computing, where every byte free was precious
You should try running visual studio 2022 and teams. On a medium sized project vs2022 will happily gobble 10+ gb of ram, and teams will take 1-2 more without supporting any meaningful scrollback. Even with ~500 tabs I can't hit 10gb ram in ff (thanks to tree style tabs to make it feasible to have so many tabs open).
You know what EMACS stands for?
Eight Meg And Constantly Swapping.
That joke was stale in 1994. You need to think of some new material.
Ooops, triggered one of the last dozen or so folk still using EMACS.
We used to write things like "LET A=COS PI" instead of "LET A=1", or "SIN PI" instead of 0, because keywords were represented as a single byte and numeric constants as five bytes so two keywords represented a useful saving of three bytes.
Back then it made a huge difference but now that modern computers have hundreds or even thousands of kilobytes of RAM free it's a bit pointless.