Not merely undaunted — inspired. They knew what could be done, in theory, and were annoyed that the hardware wasn't there yet. So they did what they could with what they had. The software landscape was a wildly different place then, and I still wonder how many good ideas were attempted and left on the ground then which would be easy / practical to implement today.

I’ve always loved Garbage-Collected languages. Using twice the RAM and 1/3 of CPU to manage memory for us makes me feel like a posh lord who will never touch the soil, at huge expense. Every day I appreciate this luxury.

Think about it: At 128k RAM and small COU, you can’t even afford separation of concerns into application layers, and thus can’t delegate work to independent teams, because simply a method calling another one is a performance hit. Multitier architecture is already a posh, modern luxury.

Then came lambdas and Java streams, twice as slow as for-each loops, but look nicer, albeit with incomprehensible stacktraces. Luxury all around!

Then came Electron.

Looking forward to Docker-Driven Programming, where each function is a Docker Compose and gets rebuilt and rethrown at each exception.