alt Hacker NewsThings That Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than (2011)
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Anders Heljsberg GOAT. Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, TypeScript, just a phenomenal career marked with better taste than any other language designer I can think of, certainly any designer whose work is so mainstream.
This is only slightly related but I just made a Turbo Vision UI for Claude Code sessions.
Well, yeah. Back in the mid-80's, software needed to be usable on a computer with a single 360KB floppy drive. (No HD, no SSD, no USB, no network, no ...) And even a big budget for RAM - which cost many orders of magnitude more than today - would really not get you around Bill Gates' 640KB DOS memory limit.
Comparing to current-day stuff is kinda like comparing battery-powered bathtub toys to jetskis.
This article basically says that a text based application (turbo pascal) is smaller than images and PDFs. Obviously.
Given development speed is way up, I'd be interested to see what a from-basic-principles simple and efficient OS and programming system might look like. Or people trying radically different versions of efficiency and simplicity, like an OS that uses an existing battle-tested sandboxed execution environment like v8 for userspace safety/isolation.
Fundamentally, many inefficiencies were justified for developer productivity, and I'm not sure that makes sense anymore, and the cost of larger projects with clear abstraction boundaries has plummetted.