There are publicly accessible MIT lectures about A&D and computing performance. Part of the taught rationale is that performance behaves like a currency. Some t

There are publicly accessible MIT lectures about A&D and computing performance. Part of the taught rationale is that performance behaves like a currency. Some thoughts about this: The more you have of it, the more you can afford to do. This is interesting to think about. There might be stuff we don't do, that we rule out because we don't even think we can afford doing them. A slightly milder effect here is that we tend to make things more structurally (architecturally) complex and expensive, just because we don't even think of making them fast in the first place. Both of these effects impose real-world limitations and costs. Secondly, if you don't have enough of it, then you tend to be constantly distracted and limited. Anyone who went through financial hardship for a time knows about the mental, physical and social tax this imposes. I think it is useful to think of performance that way. Or to turn it around: if everything we do and compute was incredibly fast and reliable (also an aspect of performance) then how would that change our behavior, well-being, productivity? Side note: Garbage collection is often used as an example in the way I describe above. One can "afford" to use it, or not. But I think this touches on a rather special aspect of performance, which is a broad term to begin with. It affects the overall memory footprint and variance (GC pauses) but doesn't necessarily affect overall latency and throughput, which are more generally applicably aspects.