Comment by deepsun

Good question, for me it was always the focus, e.g. systems programming is an infrastructure to build applications, in contrast to applications themselves. In server applications we really don't care if something takes 100 bytes of RAM when it could take 1 byte. RAM is cheap, engineers are expensive. So something like Rust doesn't make sense to use.

Maybe I'm using the terminology wrong, and it's actually Applications Programming, but it's easy to confuse with mobile/desktop applications, where RAM does matter. In servers we pay for RAM/CPUs ourselves.