[littlewing]

"The reason is a mixture of widespread ignorance about floating-point arithmetic and the desire to get maximum performance."

Hopefully developers don't misinterpret this to mean that it is idiotic or overly obsessive about performance to use floating point types in calculations. That's not true.

As an example, I once decided to use double-precision floating-point in calculations that would accumulate enough accuracy error that I had to do approximate equality conditions throughout the parts of the code that determined these solutions. This not involve monetary amounts, and we needed solutions in a few seconds, not 20-30 seconds. Each step in the solution built on the former, so I could not break it up any more to solve in parallel than it already was. Throwing faster hardware at it wasn't an option available at the time. I still think I did the right thing, and it's still an integral part of production. Just going with the standard "just use BigDecimal because it's accurate" approach would have been a mistake.