From their viewpoint: The biggest cost for the company that implements something is their employees' time, and that's likely true of your customers, as well. Yo

From their viewpoint: The biggest cost for the company that implements something is their employees' time, and that's likely true of your customers, as well. Your costs are easily measured by you; the customers' costs aren't. Reading the article, it's a little grating that their costs aren't given the same weight as yours. From your viewpoint: You've got a large constant X (representing time taken doing something un-optimizable like I/O), a small constant Y (representing the "language multiplier"), and a small constant Z (representing CPU-heavy work). So you've got something like Time=N(X+Y*Z), which for values of Y and Z in your work, means that X is by far the largest timesink. From my viewpoint: You're talking past each other, imagining different constants. It's also interesting to me that a program is still considered written in "Python" if the interesting parts are actually in C, and called from Python. You make points that I agree with about premature optimization, but I think the way you wrote your article opens it to easy misinterpretation, since everyone will view it through their workloads (which may vary strongly from yours). I would've limited the discussion explicitly to the kinds of use-cases you're thinking of.