I have a theory (and it could be complete rubbish) that people who worked with computers during the 8-bit era, and especially if they were programmers, probably developed some habits that eventually looked like efficiency or frugality later on in life. They were probably completely oblivious to what was happening to them too.
Back in the day, when we were walking uphill both ways to and from school in six feet of snow, our computers had less memory and compute available to them than the average car key fob does today. Our ideas and ambitions weren’t smaller than they are today, but the constraints within which we had to fit our ideas into were extreme by today’s standards. We didn’t know it at the time; it’s just what we had to work with. I’d consider myself a below average programmer at that time, but other people were doing amazing things with what now seems to have been next to nothing. I learned to do my mediocre programming within those same parameters, and figuring it all out just became second nature.
One thing that I noticed later in life is that I subconsciously end up finding the fewest steps in order to accomplish tasks. I don’t spend time thinking about it while I am doing it; I just eventually end up there. I used to work in a factory when I was going to college, and one of the jobs I had was to clean off the excess melted vinyl from window frames. At some point I ended up finding the combination and order of physical movements that resulted in minimal effort while delivering optimal results. I didn’t realize what was happening until I was burying the two people who were working at the next stage of the assembly process.
Later at a different job I found myself eliminating several pages of documentation for a workflow that I was doing because I started consolidating steps while doing things in a different order than what the documentation suggested. “If it’s going to ask me to do this on page 13 and then do something else in the same place on page 21, why not just do it all at once?” is how my brain was operating. It was just a habit. I became very good and very fast at that particular task, but thankfully I was allowed to move onto other things rather than be pigeon-holed.
I have talked to other people from that era about this, and many seem to have this trait to varying degrees. I wonder sometimes if programming developed the habit, or if having this trait drew us to programming, or if some combination of both things is true?