especially these days, with hardware so cheap. i've implemented viable solutions at work with cast-off hardware using debian and perl. my primary scripting host is a p75 with 64 mb ram and a 1 gb hard drive. i can leave it sitting there, running all day on various and sundry tasks that deliver real value in a very unobtrusive way, seemingly out of nowhere. as time goes on i revisit some of the stuff and clean it up, enhance it as my skills develop, but when the marginal utility of developing something new exceeds that of smoothing functional code by several orders of magnitude, it's hard to justify worrying about being fancy.

optimizaqtion, in a mathematical decision-making context, refers to finding the appropriate balance between resources expended and return. when the hardware you are using would be valued at $50-75, it's hard to justify spending $150 of my time squeezing cycles until i've reached the point at which the new stuff i want to add is contrained by what is already running (or the other way around, whichever way you want to look at it.)

look at it this way. i work in the labs of a state health department. if i deliver three solutions that occupy 6 hours a day on a machine that would be surplussed if i weren't using it, is that less optimal than delivering two applications that run in two hours? which solution do you think the taxpayers would prefer?