insightful. this question has been asked (at least) since i've been a professional programmer, which is 20+ years. start of my career, >80% of my code was dire

insightful. this question has been asked (at least) since i've been a professional programmer, which is 20+ years. start of my career, >80% of my code was directed to memory management--allocating it, re-pointing it it, and de-referencing it under what seem now like impossibly tight optimization boundaries. I still work in compiled languages, but that fraction is now about 5%. Compiler & os optimization, hardware, etc. are the obvious reasons. Plenty of other challenges--some new some old, some completely contrived quickly occupied that attention vacuum.