This viewpoint completely neglects that the programmer's time is paid for once; but the time user's and customer's spend waiting for code to complete, is repeated over and over. And they pay the bills.

That very much depends on the task at hand. Consider this: on a database there are 10,000 or so payment schedules recorded for £3 every 4 months, but it turns out this was a systematic data import error, and it should be £4 every 3 months.

Given a choice between:

Then chances are that the first solution would be preferred. OK, so the script is going to take close to three hours to run, but it's a one-off fix, and nobody has to stand over it while it's running.

There are cases where the developer's time is more precious than the performance of the program. And there are cases where the performance of the program is everything. Most, of course, are somewhere in between.

perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'

In reply to Re^2: The Rules of Optimization Club by tobyink
in thread The Rules of Optimization Club by petdance

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