If transistors can't get smaller, then software developers have to get smarter

I keep hoping that we'll get to a point where we take efficient software seriously instead of just dismissing it out of hand with a shallow interpretation of Donald Knuth's famous quote. If nothing else, we're wasting so much electricity by almost deliberately developing inefficient software to save what is only perceived to be quicker development.

They are. It's only when we look at web software that we have the excess computing power of all the clients to use at will that we can do more(?) with more.

> In 2009, a chess engine running on slower hardware, a 528 MHz HTC Touch HD mobile phone, reached the grandmaster level. The mobile phone won a category 6 tournament with a performance rating of 2898. The chess engine Hiarcs 13 runs inside Pocket Fritz 4 on the mobile phone HTC Touch HD. Pocket Fritz 4 won the Copa Mercosur tournament in Buenos Aires, Argentina with 9 wins and 1 draw on 4–14 August 2009.[33] Pocket Fritz 4 searches fewer than 20,000 positions per second.[34] This is in contrast to supercomputers such as Deep Blue that searched 200 million positions per second. Pocket Fritz 4 achieves a higher performance level than Deep Blue.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436830

We'll get used to sluggish software, in fact we are already there: all contemporary web browsers (the two that are left) became laggy monsters. Such as when you hit "back" and there's absolutely no response for several seconds. Even 10 years ago, this would be considered serious bug. There's no change in sight, everyone just keeps piling code on web.