My Mandriva desktop from which I'm typing this has about 9.5 gigs in /home (data and some programs) and about 9.5 gigs in the rest of the system.

In that 9.5 gigs I have lots of things installed. That includes 3D games. I have multiple database systems installed. There are two office suites. I have many graphics, audio, video, and animation editing packages installed. I keep around about a dozen different web browsers for testing. There's a mail server, a web server, an SSH server, and a DNS server. There are (at least) three perl installations on the system right now. There are at least six versions of the JRE installed. WINE and DOSBox are on there, along with some software written for Windows (the DOS "drive" mounts from my home directory though). Then there's all the logs, spools, docs, and other non-program data that's in the system.

If you're having trouble fitting a Linux distribution, your code, and your data onto 32 gigs of space, then there's something very wrong or your code and data are very large.