> I wonder if this will result in writing more memory-efficient software?
If the consumer market can't get cheap RAM anymore, the natural result is a pivot back to server-heavy technology (where all the RAM is anyway) with things like server-side rendering and thin clients. Developers are far too lazy to suddenly become efficient programmers and there's plenty of network bandwidth.
Developers would prefer to write good software, the challenge and the craftsmanship are a draw.
However, the customers do not care and will not pay more so the business cannot justify it most of the time.
Who will pay twice (or five times) as much for software written in C instead of Python? Not many.
Well this is patently false. For the past 3 decades, programmers have intentionally made choices which perform as poorly as the hardware will allow them. You can pretty much draw a parallel line with hardware advancement and the bloating of software.
It hasn't gotten 100x harder to display hypermedia than it was 20 years ago. Yet applications use 10x-100x more memory and CPU than they used to. That's not good software, that's lazy software.
I just loaded "aol.com" in Firefox private browsing. It transferred 25MB, the tab is using 307MB of RAM, and the javascript console shows about 100 errors. Back when I actually used AOL, that'd be nearly 10x more RAM than my system had, and would be one of the largest applications on my machine. Aside from the one video, the entire page is just formatted text and image thumbnails.
> You can pretty much draw a parallel line with hardware advancement and the bloating of software.
I do not think it is surprising that there is a Jevons paradox-like phenomena with computer memory and like other instances of it, it does not necessarily follow that this must be a result of a corresponding decline in resource usage efficiency.
This is by design. Rent your computer.. don't buy! Use Geforce Now!
There is a small part of me that wonders if my $3000 computer is worth it when that could get me about 12 years of geforce now gaming with an updated graphic card and processor at all times. But I like to tinker so I'll probably end up spending $10k or more by the end of that 12 years instead.