Wirth was complaining about the bloated text editors of the time which used unfathomable amounts of memory - 4 MB.
Today the same argument is rehashed - it's outrageous that VS Code uses 1 GB of RAM, when Sublime Text works perfectly in a tiny 128 MB.
But notice that the tiny/optimized/good-behaviour of today, 128 MB, is 30 times larger than the outrageous decadent amount from Wirth's time.
If you told Wirth "hold my bear", my text-editor needs 128 MB he would just not comprehend such a concept, it would seem like you have no idea what numbers mean in programming.
I can't wait for the day when programmers 20 years from now will talk about the amazingly optimized editors of today - VS Code, which lived in a tiny 1 GB of RAM.
This will probably not happen, because of physics.
Both, compute and memory, are getting closer to fundamental physical limits and it is unlikely that the next 60 years will be in any way like last 60 years.
While the argument for compute is relatively simple it is a bit harder to understand for memory. We are not near to any limit for the size of our memory but the limiting factor is how much storage we can bring how close to our computing units.
Now, there is still way to make and low hanging fruit to pick but I think we will eventually see a renaissance of appreciation for effective programs in our lifetimes.
> I think we will eventually see a renaissance of appreciation for effective programs in our lifetimes.
In theory, yes. But I bet that the forces of enshittification will be stronger. All software will be built to show ads, and since there is no limit to greed, the ad storage and surveillance requirements will expand to include every last byte of your appliance's storage and memory. Interaction speed will be barely enough to not impact ad watching performance too severely. Linux will not be an out, since the megacorps will buy legislation to require "approved" devices and OSs to interact with indispensable services.
Hence why I actually happy for the RAM prices getting back to how used to be, maybe new generations rediscover how to do much with little.
With all that said, applications back in the day being talked about were ridiculously easy to crash, and in the early MacOS and Win3.1 days, I mean the entire computer to the point of hitting the reset switch.
This and a huge amount of size in applications is features and libraries that allow compatibility between all kinds of different formats. Being able to open and convert almost everything is a boon, while also being a security nightmare.
Lastly I bet a lot of these applications could be way smaller if a lot of the UI prettiness was stripped from them.