One general attitude here is that it is important to learn what attitudes are important.

Take your example. Round figures let us say that a server costs $5,000 and a developer costs $60,000. (Actually both cost far more, supporting a developer includes office space, insurance, etc. Supporting a server takes up front money, installation, configuration, and ongoing administration. But the basic point remains the same.) Then a brand new machine is worth one month of one developer's time.

If you have 4-5 developers, that means that one week of wasted time is worth a brand new server. If your code review took one month, you lost money doing it. If you have an application that needs to scale, then you might find it well worth while. If there are complications with having multiple servers in your application, then keeping to a single server may be worth quite a bit of bother. If you are shipping to customers, then keeping within typical resources matters a lot. Rules of thumb tend to have lots of exceptions.

But still this is the economics of, "RAM is cheap." Developers shouldn't be stupid about it. But being only slightly concerned about memory usage while paying attention to maintainability etc is not being lazy. It is an appropriate allocation of resources for the typical situation. (If your situation varies, then optimize appropriately.)

In reply to Re (tilly) 5: Space taken by a coderef by tilly
in thread Space taken by a coderef by dragonchild

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