> What about the even poorer people who only receive new hardware when richer people buy upgrades?
Good point. I suppose a better solution for the problem of hardware obsolescence caused by software inefficiency would be for conscientious software developers to deliberately use underpowered computers. I'm ashamed that I bought a new computer with a Core i7-4770 processor and 32 GB of RAM about a year and a half ago.
I'm feeling this pretty strongly as a minimally part-time freelance developer; I can't afford new hardware, and am coding on a machine that was at best a mediocre performer seven years ago. Startup time for fairly trivial applications is significant running Lubuntu, and starting a Clojure app is painful; I just timed Clooj at 1:48.
I find that it affects my decision whether or not to optimize code; I feel it sooner than I remember doing when I was on a more powerful machine, and that makes me decide, "That inner loop has to go." It also affects my choice of language; I'm more likely to use Pascal or Nim than Python, because the result feels better when I run it.
Good point. I suppose a better solution for the problem of hardware obsolescence caused by software inefficiency would be for conscientious software developers to deliberately use underpowered computers. I'm ashamed that I bought a new computer with a Core i7-4770 processor and 32 GB of RAM about a year and a half ago.