It is remarkable how bloated modern software is.
My first hard drive, back in 1988, was 30 megabytes.
Not to mention, programs are so much more stable nowadays; I can't remember the last time my computer just locked up for no apparent reason, and I am typically pretty happy that most programs don't leak memory all over the place anymore.
Are a lot of programs bloated now? Sure, but I think I'd rather have that than having my program crash all the time because someone who didn't really know what they're doing cleared a pointer incorrectly.
I know languages like Rust and Swift have ways of safely dealing with memory without a GC, and I know Go has a non-blocking GC now, but remember that all of these things are relatively recent.
Those are very different things, to my knowledge. Rust is "no-GC" in the vein of C and C++ (but the borrow checker makes the memory management portion easier to deal in that you generally don't have to manually free stuff). Swift is "memory managed" in that is uses reference counts to automatically check through the used variables and free ones that are no longer references. In my eyes, that's pretty clearly a type of garbage collection, even if it seems the term has become specific enough that it's less often applied to that case.
That said, technically you are correct, it is a GC, just one with a lot lower overhead than something like Java/C#/JavaScript/Python.
Today, we get that kind of optimization, for the whole program, simply by adding -O2 to our build options, and waiting slightly longer for the compiler to complete.
Engineers using that quote are an important reason for the failure of software projects. Not only should we make efficient use of resources, but performance of software must be taken into account right from the beginning of any software project. Performance requirements must be clear from the start (how many concurrent users, how many requests per second, etc., times 2 (or 20) for safety) and when a design is made, performance requirements for each individual component should be set (and measured after implementation).
I strangely hear that quite often too on morning traffic ;). When will theses real professional engineers will learn?!?!?!
> make the most efficient use of resources
Can you define this? Everything can be done more efficiently.
A real professional engineers won't do premature optimization. You won't see bridges using some amazing new carbon material, it's not only too costly for the budget, it's also not needed (the bridge does everything it has to do per the requirement).
A real professional engineers will do the most he can with the resource he has, which is pretty much what we do in software engineering.
Over the years I have wasted a lot of time reviewing or discussing "optimizations" that didn't help - or even hurt - performance. Micro-optimizing some once-off init function instead of tackling major per-frame overhead and stuttering. Creating a nice lean core site and then burdening it with a billion third party scripts requested by marketing.
30MB matters for a website, or keyboard firmware.
On the other hand, my gamedev workloads often crash on 32GB machines. I measure useful SSD sizes in TB. In that context, 30MB is line noise. A rounding error. You could spend a lifetime optimizing more important performance issues, and still never turn your attention to that 30MB as something useful to spend time reducing further.
The fact of the matter is that quality simply does not matter in today's world. Not in software, not in hardware, not in food, clothing, cars, or basically any other area. It's all about minimizing costs.
Fine tuning code is one thing, but installing a bloated package for one tiny feature should be well-considered at the time of implementation because every addition adds to the tech debt bill.
Nothing about the original quote was related to Turing's law.
Try to make software good enough to sell, and that is quickly the obvious conclusion.
...unless it's this sort of fun, perhaps? https://xkcd.com/303/