Anyone care to explain why programs nowadays use so much bloody RAM? We went to the moon on what amounted to a bunch of potatoes wired to each other, Linux (a whole bloody OS) with a graphical interface consumes only a couple hundred MB of RAM, but my IDE needs 1+GB?

Seriously, unless you're handling very large amounts of data (like a high res image or doing some insanely crazy math, I doubt there's any need for such high usage. I get it, 8/16GB is commonplace, but that doesn't mean more should be used for shits and giggles...