>>98
if you're programming for a modern personal computer or smart phone, memory is effectively unlimited. This is by far what most programs are written for today. In my professional life, the only time I have/had to worry about amount of memory is on video cards when writing shaders. Other than that, it's never a problem. Even (or even especially) when I'm writing in a functional style, because there's so much less "defensive copying" going on when you can safely share immutable data structures. Copying of that kind is epidemic in side-effect heavy languages like C++ and Java.
the claim is not that optimization is not important, it's that we are optimizing *wrong*, just like people in the early 80's who were still writing assembly were optimizing wrong. Efficiency comes from simplicity, not from clever hacks and too much attention to system resources. The same thing that happened to assembly -- computers becoming better at writing it efficiently than humans -- is happening and is certainly going to happen more to: memory management, multithreading. Moreso multithreading than memory management, but the thing is, proper, lockless multithreading requires an abstraction of memory and the only reason we are so very concerned with optimizing memory and caches in the first place is because we are so very terrified of writing functional code that nobody on the hardware side is putting much effort into making it worth it.
I'm not claiming that low level programming will be a forgotten art. All abstractions leak. But it really is attitudes like yours that are holding us back. we've hit this single-thread performance bottleneck and nobody wants to put a lot of effort into the right solutions because nobody wants to learn them or take a step back and think about their programs differently.