For me, performance has to be really important, such as a program that will be running hundreds of times per day. Or for a server, where a small increase in performance means fewer total systems to buy and maintain.

The difference between 1 second and 1 minute in the daily grind isn't much at all. Especially considering how long I spend just waiting for some applications to start up in the first place.

If the process "multiplier" is only 1 (me, once a day), 1 minute is just long enough for a trip to the soda machine, so I won't mind.

Depending on the C compiler, updates can take 10 minutes (compile, link, fix stupid bugs, repeat) compared to Perl.

I once had a class project to write 1/3 of a trading system (along with my 2 teammates, who wrote the other 2/3). They used C, I used Perl. One of them implemented the interface wrong, so our project didn't work. We had 20 minutes to deadline, and he was going to need 2 hours to find the bug and fix it. Instead, I changed my Perl version to handle his mistake, and we turned it in 5 minutes after we discovered the problem (including testing).

Speed of execution is rarely a requirement.

-QM
--
Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of

In reply to Re^3: fast way to split and sum an input file by QM
in thread fast way to split and sum an input file by egunnar

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