> Compilation speed greatly effects your ability to iterate in your development process. Depending on your skill level, for most programmers this can be MASSIVE

> Compilation speed greatly effects your ability to iterate in your development process. Depending on your skill level, for most programmers this can be MASSIVE Compilation speed is not the only factor in ability to iterate. This argument is the exact bikeshed argument that gets made all the time. Even if your compilation is insanely fast, your build pipeline might be insanely slow. Compilation speed alone isn't enough to really make any value judgements at all, is my entire point. > Sure there are ultra high experience devs who can make a thousand line edit, send the build and have it run perfectly 4 hours later. Even in that case you need to consider the cost of coding extra defensively to make sure it's right the first time. My last job used Ruby on Rails, a language that is touted to have extremely fast iteration speed. That company also chose to have a build process run all tests (unit + system), such that a "build" took 3+ hours. To say, "Ruby on Rails has fast iteration speed and doesn't require a compile step" ignores so much context about what's actually happening, the statement is effectively useless.