“Back in my days everything was better!” is a sentence we often hear from our elders. As we can hear sometimes from their stories, the grass was greener and the people were more kind (at least thats the claim). But this is just a side-node and I’d like to switch to my actual topic now, which is about today’s kids programming.

I often miss some understanding of handling resources more efficiently, being more conscious about memory usage and CPU cycles. Back in my days everything was better! My first computer came with 32 KB of RAM and a CPU clocked with 1 MHz (for comparison: The standard icon file for displaying folders in the Finder on my Mac alone uses 356 KB). The screen had 2 colors. The machine had no Hard disk or external drive. Switching off the machine meant to lose everything that was input.

Of course computers nowadays can execute tens of thousands of million instructions per second and come stocked with gigabytes of RAM per default. So for newcomers there is no immediate pressure of actually having to care about those resources at first glance. But if we think about it again there are many reasons why we should care about it. Nowadays we are a bit short of electricity because of the huge earthquake that happened this march and everyone is requested to do their share of saving energy wherever it is possible.

Programmers who don’t care about CPU cycles are effectively wasting energy. For one single instance of our software this might not be a huge impact, but as more unneeded operations can be omitted overall, the power savings can become quite significant. It is similar of how little energy can be saved by switching off your appliances instead of only using the standby mode: For one person the amount of savings seem insignificant, but for the society as a whole it has a big impact. In my opinion the unawareness of today’s students is a flaw in our teaching system. Newcomers learn to program with languages like Java where they don’t have to spend even one thought about memory management and Assembly is a noun that has to be looked up in Wikipedia.

I am calling out for teaching programming with more restricted resources in order to sensitize the new generation of programmers for more efficient software. Teach them more about the implications! Give them embedded devices with restricted resources!