>>49I used to think like this, then when I got to the real world I realized that speed still matters... a lot.
I'm not a programmer, I'm an ME. But even so the programming tasks I did required heavy optimization.
My first job out of college was at a test lab. Every once in a while I had to write software that processed data in some form. We collected a lot of data. It wasn't uncommon to be processing 20GB+ of data. Optimizations and using a sensible language can take your run time from days to hours.
My next job I was making consumer products. The products obviously had to be as cheap as possible which meant the cheapest MCU possible. Another case where memory had to optimized to painstaking measures.
So you're wrong. And not just a little bit. As computers get faster, we'll just work them harder. And we need to do this to squeeze out real productivity. Quit your damn whining and learn how to actually optimize shit.