Linkbait. "Aren't the teats the only interesting part of a cow?" Uhh, sure, yes, you get the milk from that, I don't know if I'd define "interesting" that way

Linkbait. "Aren't the teats the only interesting part of a cow?" Uhh, sure, yes, you get the milk from that, I don't know if I'd define "interesting" that way. As for his actual argument. Depends on the application. If you run 20 lines of code, no loops, for 2mil clients on one server, that 20 lines matters. If that 20 lines includes one line which requires a lock, maybe only that one line matters. Maybe I analyze a graph structure (oh, the social web) and my loop is a loop per say not not anything that can be easily optimized without knowing the topology. The slow part of your loop can be the loop body. Or not --- it can be the allocation/deallocation cost of data structures. Parallelism can be fast --- or the concurrency weight can be crushing. I'm not saying that parallelism isn't a huge win. I'm saying the question is invalid or trivial. Point is, the generalization here isn't wrong; generalization here is wrong.