What about calculating the ecological impact of the programming languages running on those 'cloud' servers? Some of the most popular languages are the least pe

What about calculating the ecological impact of the programming languages running on those 'cloud' servers? Some of the most popular languages are the least performative (we all know which ones), but they make life easier for developers. Thankfully, newer languages take performance seriously: Rust, Go, Nim, Crystal. A typed, compiled language gives you good performance for free and a smaller memory footprint (and the reduced computing resources that implies). When you consider the millions of servers in use, that additional language efficiency adds up to a substantial saving in electricity use. In the computing field, we readily encourage throwing cheap hardware at a performance problem until a program runs fast. It's embarrassing that the "hardware is cheap" attitude is so widespread among developers. Imagine if a manufacturer said that they were going to make energy-guzzling fridges/washing machines or other appliances without regard to energy-efficiency. In programming, everything is for the ease and comfort of the programmer and anything else takes a back seat - the user, energy use and ultimately the environment. Aside - If you think programming language energy usage a ridiculous topic, consider the follow: The creator of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, calculated potential CO2 savings due to speed improvements in PHP 7: fewer servers, smaller memory use and reduced CPU activity. (And remember this is an interpreted language.) You can watch a segment from his presentation below where he talks about the calculations he made of potential CO2 savings: Rasmus Lerdorf – "PHP in 2018" (extract from the 15 min mark): https://youtu.be/umxGUWYmiSw?t=15m16s https://youtu.be/umxGUWYmiSw?t=15m16s