I do understand the implication that lowering the need for always faster hardware for end users will slow down the pace of development of new hardware. But with the end of Moore's law upon us, that's inevitable anyway.
Our computers are plenty fast today, beyond what we could imagine when each of us started programming. Let's cut down on abstractions. Let's profile, optimize.
I fear cheating would be too easy, though —just lift the restrictions.
Though I wish more time was spent on some tools to make them more memory efficient(I'm looking at you, scala and friends), that's just not how it is today. I just bought a new laptop with 32 gigs of ram, and hopefully that is future-proof for the next few years.
A better solution would be for testing, particularly UAT, to be done inside resource-constrained VM's, instead.
The other guy that replied to your comment is basically right. My old laptop had a measly 4GB of RAM, and opening multiple tabs in Chrome for documentation, running an editor, some development tools like REPLs etc, and I'd basically be out of RAM. I would literally listen to music on my phone because spotify consumed too much of my precious RAM, and I had to kill off tabs that I hadn't used for a while like it was Survivor, in order to keep my laptop from start swapping(which means everything grinds to a halt).
I even run a very minimalistic window manager and don't use IDEs like IntelliJ or anything.
Humans are really good at remembering spaces. ("Describe for me your childhood bedroom." or "What did your third grade teacher look like?")
There's already the idea of "memory palaces" [1] suggesting you can take advantage of spatial memory for other purposes.
I wonder, what would it be like to learn or search a codebase by walking through it and looking around?
Some humans. I honestly can't answer you those two questions. I'm much better in remembering what I just read than what space I just saw, and I absolutely suck at remembering (not to mention describing) faces. If you mugged me I probably wouldn't be able to describe you to police beyond the basics like gender and height (I probably won't be remembering what you were wearing).
I say this because being good at remembering spaces is like "everyone sketch a picture when trying to convey an idea" elsewhere in the thread - both are examples of what some people do, and it may be surprising to discover that not all humans are good at it.
No reason for concern, but there is supposedly an incredibly low occurrence of either.