Bloat costs

[Chip Salzenberg]

According to jca at pnet01.cts.com (John C. Archambeau):
>chip at tct.uucp (Chip Salzenberg) writes:
>>Competent C compilers can be written in small model.  I once worked on
>>a C compiler that ran on a PDP-11, which as everyone knows, is limited
>>to 64K of data under most (all?) Unix implementations.
>
>Which brings forth the argument in favor of progress.  How many people
>actually use PDP-11's anymore?

PDP-11 usage statistics matter not at all.  The point is
that it can be done, but some people would have you think
that it can't be done, so they can escape the mental effort
required to do it.

The "What do you want to do, return to the dark ages?"
retort reminds me of a quote from Theodor Nelson, who in
turn was quoting a computer consultant of the 70s:

    "If it can't be done in COBOL,
     I just tell them it can't be done by computer.
     It saves everyone a lot of time."

Obviously this consultant was a trogolodyte.  One would
hope that such attitudes are a thing of the past.

Substitute "four megabytes of RAM" for "COBOL", however,
and you get a depressingly accurate summary of the attitude
of the day.  Am I implying that that 4M-or-die programmers
are trogolodytes as well?  You bet your data space I am.
-- 
Chip Salzenberg at ComDev/TCT   <chip%tct at ateng.com>, <uunet!ateng!tct!chip>