Hell, I could spend $200 for a month of server time on AWS and run a lot of my (web API) code 100 billion times.
Optimizing for human readers is always better until you're working on something that proves itself to be too slow to be economical anymore.
user > ops > dev
biz > ops > dev
biz ≹ user
Or they picked a title that would let you rapidly spot who didn't even skim the article.
(And most of your users don't have developer's salary, or developer's quality of life, so it hurts them that many times more.)
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[0] - Yes, wasting someone's time reduces QALY.
> that by making the code better for the user,
Did you mean the dev?
Abstractions MIGHT make your code slower. But there's a reason we're not using assembly: Because the minor efficiency hit on the software doesn't match up with the bugs, the salary towards the experts, the compilation errors, etc.
A VM is a pretty good tradeoff for users, not just devs.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year
> When I say “run” I don’t just mean executing a program; I mean operating it in production, with all that it entails: deploying, upgrading, observing, auditing, monitoring, fixing, decommissioning, etc
the inference process in article is interesting, but title tempt us to debate about a less related topic.
thanks for your comments let me finish reading.
If you don't fit in the budget for the specific task, your product features don't matter much.
Like I said, it works until it doesn't, and then you do have to optimize for performance to some extent.
Some LLVM-based language would fit the bill better, like Rust, C (also true of the intel compiler and gcc), C++, etc.
This sort of calculations you preach are inherently untrue, as they completely ignore that 1second times million. After all, nobody bothers economically evaluate just a single second. But it does account to much, when multiplied by the ammount of users. And when we multiply again, by the times a single user uses your software, and then again, by the time a users uses different software from other developers who also thought "it's only 1 second, nobody cares", we end up living in world where software usability gets lower and lower despite hardware getting faster and faster.
We end up living in a world where literally weeks are wasted everyday, waiting for slow windows file explorer. If you'd want to evaluate that honestly, you would probably come to conclusion that microsoft should have a dedicated team, working for decade on nothing but explorer startup optimization, and it would still pay for it self.
But they don't. Because at the end of the day, this whole "lets evaluate developers time working on given improvement" is just a cope and justification of being us lazy, that only pretends to be an objective argument so we can make ourself feels better
So running the software includes more than just the server costs.
Another way of stating the relationship could be something like: You have fewer brain-cycles to apply to optimization than the combined sum of everyone who will ever read your code, if your code matters. But that is a mouthful and kind of negative.