4 ms·
The danger with the "speed doesn't matter" attitude is that you end up with a 10x slowdown due to language choice, and then another 10x slowdown due to ineffici
by army 12y ago
The danger with the "speed doesn't matter" attitude is that you end up with a 10x slowdown due to language choice, and then another 10x slowdown due to inefficient implementation, and you end up with a 100x slowdown, which might actually be significant even in situations where speed doesn't matter that match.
- bhauer 12y agoThe sentiment you just wrote is one of the chief inspirations for the TechEmpower Framework Benchmarks project that I'm part of. Today, we routinely see huge amounts of computational horsepower evaporated in the name of developer efficiency. Yet the modern web development ecosystem is so plentiful and diverse that there are myriad high-productivity platforms and frameworks that exploit computational horsepower rather than squander it. My opinion is that investing the modest effort to select a high-performance platform and framework gives you the freedom to write inefficient application code first and to optimize later. It is the process that allows you to avoid the most expensive kind of premature optimization I've seen by postponing optimization until well after an application's concept has been vetted by its first several thousand users.