Rich Hickey's presentation which received a standing ovation from Dr. Sussman.
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Anonymous2011-10-22 7:03
If a script that is run twice a day to make back ups of some logs takes a couple minutes longer than it could have if it was written in C, then most likely, nothing bad will happen, and the choice of using the scripting language over C would pay off in terms of development time.
Except if that script will be run twice a day, every day, for an undetermined number of years. An extra minute a day is 6 hours every year. If that script took several more minutes to develop in C, you've still gained that time back after a while.
"Programmer time is expensive" only makes sense in the context of writing code that will be used a very limited number of times by a very limited number of users. Otherwise the initial time investment will be recovered very quickly.
I can write a script in an HLL in 2 minutes to perform a task in 10 minutes, or I could take 10 minutes to write it in C, so it will perform the same task in 5 minutes. If I'm only going to run it once, the HLL makes sense - 12 minutes total vs 15 minutes for C. If I'm going to run it twice, it changes -- 10*2 + 2 = 22 minutes, vs 5*2 + 10 = 20 minutes. And the more times you need to do that task, the more time you'll save with your initial investment.
CPUs are pretty fast. It might be cheaper to just buy a faster computer.
Speed is NOT infinite. Do not assume hardware will keep getting faster, because its improvement is already slowing down.
It pretty much comes down to the cost of development time. If a programmer could write a quick script for something in 15 minutes, where writing a program in a high performance language would take a day or two, then the script is much cheaper.
No. It depends on how many times the script will be used, and by how many users.