[zionic]

>A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning

And that's the crux of it. Donald neglected to understand that most programmers will takeaway "optimization is bad" and all the subtleties of his point will be lost.

Then we get things like electron (ducks for cover)

[ummonk]

Donald was also writing at a time when all languages were close to the metal and optimization meant using various tricks (or writing critical portions in assembly) to improve performance.

[FpUser]

>"when all languages were close to the metal"

That writing was 1974, Lisp had already existed.

[ncmncm]

And even caches. Though we called it "core", back then. Main memory was disk, tape, or drum, and cache misses caused page faults, if you were fortunate, or you had to roll in overlays yourself. Nowadays RAM is as inaccessible as disk was then, and you swap 64-byte pages, sometimes with network negotiations with remote (NUMA) cores, all in hardware.

[Ygg2]

> Then we get things like electron

We get electron because it's a batteries included (and remote and TV) cross platform GUI.

And has a huge talent pool, and acceptable performance for most users.