"Jeff M." <mass...@gmail.com> writes: > On Jun 9, 9:08 pm, Arved Sandstrom <dces...@hotmail.com> wrote: >> Jon Harrop wrote: >> > >> > Arved Sandstrom wrote: >> >> >> >> Jon, I do concurrent programming all the time, as do most of my peers. >> >> Way down on the list of why we do it is the reduction of latency. >> >> > What is higher on the list? >> >> Correctness. >> > > IMO, that response is a bit of a cop-out. Correctness is _always_ most > important, no matter what application you are creating; without it, > you don't have a job and the company you work for goes out of > business. > > But, assuming that your program works and does what it's supposed to, > I agree with Jon that performance needs to be right near the top of > the list of concerns. Why? Performance isn't about looking good as a > programmer, or having fun making a function run in 15 cycles instead > of 24, or coming up with some neat bit packing scheme so that your app > now only uses 20K instead of 200K. Performance is - pure and simple - > about one thing only: money.
Programmer time is vastly more expensive than CPU time, so the money argument often leads to slow ("low performance") solutions as long as they are "good enough" because developing a faster solution would mean spending more valuable programmer time at a cost that cannot be recovered over the life cycle of the product in question. That being said, there are plenty of situations where performance obviously does matter a great deal -- as you correctly pointed out. (It all depends on the above mentioned "product in question" and the nature of its life cycle.) Matthias -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list