I'm relatively new to programming, but one of the things that has been pounded into my head during my short career is that as hardware cheapens, human time is becoming more precious than computer time.

In every piece of code I write, I am continually conscious of writing in a way that will make the code easy to maintain and extend in the future. It seems that for the majority of applications being written today, efficiency should be defined in terms of development and maintenance (3 & 4 above).

It would be interesting, though, to work on a project where CPU time was the highest priority. Maybe someday... :-)

--Dave