I can totally understand were Graham is coming from. I must absolutely have 16Gb on my next laptop and 32Gb on my desktop and they both must be using SSDs, i7 and preferably dual CPU E3/E5s for the deskop. If I set it to anything less I will be wasting my time watching the hourglass.
Having to open browsers to look up information kills performance more than anything. If you have all the information in your at your fingertips and don't have to look up anything online that is fine. Lazarus will work fine on 2Gb. Open your browser have a few VMs running and everything will crawl to a halt. Try working across different technologies and OSs simultaneously and you will need those. Visual Studio here, Eclipse there, Android Studio there and you are in for a rough time.
When you recollect having to pay 1000s for 386 and 486 systems with 16Mb of RAM, 32Gb systems in 2017 for 1000s are an absolute steal. The problem is development tools have become bloated when in the past they were tightly coded. C++ and Java and the culprits here.
https://www.xkcd.com/303/Graeme you mentioned recently that you were compiling Firefox. How long did it take?
FWIW computer developers have become cheapskates who undervalue their work and/or allow their work to be undervalued. Other professionals pay far more for their tools and they don't even whinge. Even Uber drivers invest more in the cars and they don't gripe about costs so much.