Hello dsimcha,
== Quote from Nick Sabalausky (a...@a.a)'s article
In general though, I find the "programmer time is more expensive than
hardware" line to largely be a cop-out.
Fair enough, but can you elaborate on this? Of course hardware is
getting cheaper relative to programming time. This is obvious to
anyone who doesn't live under a rock. My previous post was pointing
out how this is relevant in case that was less obvious.
Always be VERY careful when you compare cost that are paid by different people.
For programming, the better the product does, the more irrelevant programmer
times is. To boot, programmer time is a more or less fixed cost (you can
stop paying it any time you want), and slow code is an open ended one (your
customers will be paying for it until the last person quits using your program).
I'd even go so far as to venture that for any reasonably successful program,
quite a lot of optimization time can be a net gain for the economy at large.
If I ever am in a position to do it, I will mandate that executive demos
will always be first done using a 10-25th percentile machine from our current
target market. Only once it is shown to run reasonably on that, will the
team be allowed to show what it can do on better hardware.
