Your point is well said. Programs have grown fat and lazy because there is little incentive to optimize them. Even a badly-written implementation will seem to shine on good, fast hardware.

I can understand this a bit in commercial shops where profits matter. Programmer time is far more expensive than CPU time and memory. Worse yet, the time needed to optimize could delay the product, allowing a competitor to beat you to market. Let's face it - most software companies don't even do a thorough job of testing and debugging their products. The attitude seems to be, "Hey, it compiles! Ship it."

Unfortunately, it's not just market pressure that drives this bloat. We see it in Open Source programs, too. Much as I'd love to blame it all on Microsoft, it's pervasive throughout the industry.

But I'm wondering whether this is really a Bad Thing. Yes, it goes against the grain. It bothers me that programs are bloated and sluggish - but if it's easier to just use fast hardware to compensate, does it really make much difference? Isn't that just using the resources in the most economical way? I don't know.

So my question is, why should we optimize, when that's so much more expensive than just using faster machines?

In reply to Re^2: multi-PC tasking by spiritway
in thread multi-PC tasking by samizdat

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