3 ms·

> People willing to trade the hard scientific measurements such as memory footprint and runtime speed for something so ephemeral as programmer happiness. I'm s

• davidw 17y ago
  No, what he's saying is that there is a tradeoff involved, and that for many things, it's better to optimize for programmer time/productivity, rather than for machine time. This has been true for 50 some odd years: http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/12/04/the-economics-of-programming-languages-in-the-1950s http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/12/04/the-economics-of-progr... Clearly, that's not true in all cases, and some code has to be fast. However, it's often best to avoid premature optimization - write the code, explore the problem domain, and then speed up the bits that need it.
• marcusbooster 17y ago
  I think we've reached the point where it shouldn't take "several hours to perform simple operations" on any modern compiler/platform. Instead, it shouldn't take several hours of a programmers time to develop simple operations. I'd agree with the conclusion of this post, "Hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive": http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001198.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001198.html