Hear hear! My personal cycles are much more valuable than those of a computer.
The three main bottlenecks to program execution speed are (in order of increasing cost):
- RAM
- CPU
- Program efficiency
It may not be politically-correct and it may not be the thing to say, but inefficient programs that are "good enough" are, well, "good enough". You don't have to achieve perfection. If your program executes faster than the human mind can register, but uses a bubble-sort ... who cares?!? It's not scalable, but if it doesn't have to be ... it's a moot point.
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We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.
Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.