>I see a lot of people complain about the habits of the 'newer generation' >programmer citing anecdotes about the 'old days' when efficiency was key. But >the truth is, efficiency was key in the old days because you had no choice- >hardware was expensive, and the word RAD wasn't even invented yet. Modern code >that you consider 'sloppy' because it is slow, was probably written in 1/10th >the time that it would take to write the same program in COBOL 85 or 1/100th >of the time it would have taken to do it in assembler. The hardware costs now >pay for themselves...

I think the thing that twists peoples crank is when companies use hardware and software as a mechanism to "force" a continuous cycle of upgrading one or the other. IOW, if you want the new tool, you gotta buy the new OS. If you want the new OS, you gotta buy the new chip, etc, etc. At some point a large number of users are going to say, this is my machine, I'm not buying another one, therefore I'm only interested in software that works on MY machine. I found that to be the norm outside the US.