I agree. When I was at university, I bought a top-of-the-line Macbook. Not even a year later, I couldn't even run Eclipse and Firefox at the same time without swapping. Any time I needed to switch from Eclipse to Firefox or vice versa, I wound up waiting a noticeable length of time while the system was busy paging one out of RAM and the other in.
I'm on board with Niklaus Wirth: https://cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf