Yeah, in the desktop era, you had huge amounts of bloat. Programmers assumed there was one user sitting behind the machine, and they were only doing one thing at a time, which was essentially true.

Performance matters more with mobile and cloud (sorry for buzzwords) -- in mobile because of battery life, and in cloud because a single machine supports so many users. And because we got stuck at 3 Ghz or so, so now we actually have to write concurrent and parallel software.

Although I suppose what appears to be happening isn't that application programmers are writing more efficient code. Instead, stack is getting taller, and systems programmers are applying JIT techniques to high level code -- e.g. v8, PyPy, HHVM, Julia, Swift, other LLVM users, etc.

So certainly some programmers are writing very efficient code -- there seems to be a a resurgence in that. But it seems to be systems programmers and not application programmers. For applications, productivity and high level abstractions like DSLs seem to be more important than performance (e.g. all these new and bloated JS frameworks).

Come on over to embedded software! Its all about efficiency, space, power, bytes and bandwidth.

You have no idea how good that sounds. "Enterprise" programming is soul-destroying, and the current vogue for mile-high node-based JS stacks looks even worse.

I miss the good old days of futzing around in 68k assembler for fun and... well, just fun, really.

You see this somewhat in mobile computers (phones). The power and thermal constraints limit performance, so developers limit features vs. their desktop counterparts.

I don't think anything has really changed. iOS 7 ran sluggishly on an iPhone 4, just as Windows Vista did on machines that came out when Windows XP was new.

It's already happening with tiny cloud-based computing images. MirageOS gets you a web server that's less than one megabyte.