This makes me sad both as an engineer and an environmentalist. Speed (efficiency) and simplicity are artful endeavours, but hardware is making everyone lazy. On the web, it’s mostly visible through memory consumption and bandwidth inconsideration, but it’s visible in other software too.
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Hahah… I learned something new. Thanks @kevinSmith
catholicon: I thought they’re kinda like statues in catholic churches.
Like those damn crypto mining machines… I hope all cryptos crash so price of video cards will come back to normal again.
My point is that sometimes optimization can be become a distracting obsession. f you are building a simple calculator program, than whether it takes .00001 seconds to add or .00002 seconds is irrelevant. In that case it makes more sense to write in a higher level language that allows for easier coding and maintainability. In that case, the UX and design are more important.
On the opposite side, if you are writing a program to make precise aeronautical calculations of, then every millisecond counts as you are going to have to make that calculation a few billion times. In that case, efficiency is paramount.
I do not see the need to maximize efficiency in a program where the user will never even notice. If you can show me where it will impact the UX, then I’m all for it. But efficiency for the sake of efficiency is at best and exercise and at worst an ego trip. And all that time spent maximizing efficiencies that the user will never see is time that is not spent on things the user will see. Or at least is time that is extending the length of the project unnecessarily.
You cannot maximize everything. Life is about about trade-offs. There is a time and a place for the “let’s see if we can obsessively milk every ounce of efficiency out of this” is a good idea. And there are other times when it just won’t matter.
Of course, this shouldn’t be license for clumsily inefficient code. If there is a simple elegant solution that should be obvious, then I would agree it is a bad idea to not use it.
But everything is a trade off. When I studied coding back in the 90s, the talk was a trade off between speed and memory. Now they’ve added in scalability, security, readability, maintainability, longevity, etc.