Fast forward to today. A program to load /usr/share/dict/words into a hash table is 3-5 lines of Perl or Python, depending on how terse you mind being. [...] T

Fast forward to today. A program to load /usr/share/dict/words into a hash table is 3-5 lines of Perl or Python, depending on how terse you mind being. [...] That's progress. I was curious -- This Python script consumes 9.5 MB of RAM on my Mac, which is a whole lot of 1980s-era PCs. Sure, in most cases this one decision to use a terse but unoptimized data structure won't matter much on a modern computer, but it adds up!