[taeric]

Indeed, the quote of Knuth on this is followed immediately by not neglecting that critical minority of code where it matters.

Sadly, the promise of zero cost abstraction is a huge siren call. And not likely to change anytime soon.

[jaawn]

"Zero cost abstraction" is like a sarcastic joke at this point in web development. If you pull up performance comparisons for web backends, a lot of the popular ones based on interpreted languages are absolutely abysmal when compared to c++ or Java code (Node is a good example). Many definitely have streamlined development workflows and have nice, high-level abstractions, but at a cost to performance. I don't mean that Node is useless or something, sometimes it makes sense, but it still forces you to compromise.

Front-end frameworks are even worse. A lot of older (but not "ancient") PCs are unusable on the modern web because of poorly-optimized JS or Adobe Flash (a decent portion of this issue is also due to the inherent inefficiency of JS and Flash as well). Fortunately, Google has been making strides with V8, Mozilla did awesome with Firefox "Quantum" and everyone is slowly ditching Flash, but performance still seems to be an ever-present issue.

[taeric]

Fully agreed. I might extend it beyond web.

It does seem to be getting comical.