the 7 was a freqak'n typo ....
I learned Coding in the late 70's/early 80's....... back when every byte xtra
of code mattered, something nowadays coders care nothing about, and seem
to write very un-elegant, bloated .... code...!!!
I too learned coding from the old days. The thing is, the structured coding of those days gave way to object oriented coding and that changed the way coding is done. I remember working on the Diffuse X-Ray Spectrometer (a space bound experiment). The code for that was about 200 lines and part of my job was to reduce that as much as possible and make it more reliable. Page after page of printouts on green bar with all kinds of note lines and so on. Eventually, though it was written in C, we wrote most of it in Assembler. Due to the Challenger accident we didn't send it up until 1992 or so. In any case, it ran on a 8086 CPU and had, if I remember correctly, 256KP of storage space. Think about that in terms of optimization!
But OOP is cheaper and as hardware prices have come down and processor speeds have come up there is no need to optimize anything. The first version of Lotus 1-2-3 ran on a PC with 256,768 bytes. A spreadsheet that worked very well running in the little space because it had to do so. Now the answer is: "if it takes too much space, buy more space." AND, in addition, "if it's too slow buy a bigger, faster CPU (technically it's an MPU, but everybody knows it the wrong way so I use the wrong way.)
When I was teaching IT I in the late 1990's I used to have a lecture titled "It's the marketing, stupid." Everything done in the tech field is about profit and even the better technology is dumped when companies can make more money, or consumers can have something for less. If we were willing to pay for the best tech there would have been no Microsoft Windows by about 1990. We'd all have had Macs. Now, it's different but then that's what would have happened.
So OOP is cheaper and thus they make more money. Supporting FLASH and upgrading it's core was not an option for Adobe for two reasons. First, HTML5 was on the drawing board and from the RFC's (Requests for Comment sent out when the industry suggests a new technology) it was evident the industry wanted to replace it anyway. So HTML5 got something like FLASH incorporated and Adobe got to dump a product that was vital to the gaming world but not profitable to them. Developers have been given years (usually 2-3 minimum) to port their FLASH products to HTML5 but of course many wait until the last moment to do so and end up with very buggy programs as they have the steep learning curve of HTML5 and not enough time to really be great at it. HTML5 is sometimes buggy at the app end, not the core -- and sometimes at the core.
So, while I concur that programmers today don't understand what's going on in the hardware and thus have no interest in optimization, for a company to take such an interest only means they won't be round in 5 years as their competitors will be much, much more profitable. It really is the marketing.
AJ