If you are in the games industry, you solve n-body problems all the time. If it's a multiplayer game, you work with distributed n-body problems. Even if all you

If you are in the games industry, you solve n-body problems all the time. If it's a multiplayer game, you work with distributed n-body problems. Even if all you did was a CRUD app, if you truly became successful, memory footprint and CPU usage will matter. The 300x slowdown from Ruby will sting. But for everybody else, you're right. None of this is relevant, in the same way that a 5000 hp car engine isn't useful to anybody but Batman. Personally, I am very fortunate to not think about nothing but CRUD apps all the time. Working with games, all the fun things like sort speed, path finding, etc are real world problems :)