I'd be interested to know the added energy cost (in terms of programmers) of writing the code in the first place and subsequently maintaining it
* edit- thinking about it it's probably negligable
* edit- thinking about it it's probably negligable
As for any other product, this is a trade-off between fixed and variable cost: want to do some quick processing on an hourly basis? Just write a quick python script with a Cron. Want to compute something billions of time? Use C or something more modern that compiles. Need even more savings? Build an ASIC doing the job.