[kelseyfrog]

An enormous factor here is the cult of speed. This mantra — performance above all — has touched every generation of programmers. The zero-overhead zealots, the minimal-runtime purists, these camps are not only present, they are crowd out every other perspective. It's not that their arguments are entirely unfounded. Language choice does have a causal effect on application performance. The issue is that these voices drown out all others.

The root of the problem is measurement. Speed is one of the few dimensions of software that is trivially quantifiable, so it becomes the yardstick for everything. This is textbook McNamara Fallacy[1]: what is easy to measure becomes what is measured, and what is not easily measured is erased from the calculus. See developer velocity, cognitive overhead, maintainability, and joy. It's the same fallacy that McNamara made in Vietnam and Rumsfield made in the War on Terror so at least they're in good company.

This singular focus distorts decisions around language choice, especially among the inexperienced, who haven't yet learned to recognize trade-offs or to value the intangibles software process. Like you said, humans are irrational, but this is one particularly spectacular dimension of that irrationality.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

[alex_smart]

> performance above all — has touched every generation of programmers

I find it hard to reconcile this with the actual observed trend of all software getting slower and more memory intensive over time

[sevensor]

My observation from internal C projects I’ve worked with is that they often end up doing the wrong thing very fast, because the right thing is so hard to express in C. If you do the wrong thing ten million times, it can start to approximate the right thing. The best of all worlds is using a low level language for speed and a high level language for dealing with complexity. I very much doubt there’s one right language for everything.

[kelseyfrog]

You can simply scroll down in this very comments section to find folks arguing about the performance characteristics of various languages in the context of making claims about their benefits. Res ipsa loquitur

[eviks]

That's simple indeed, but also simply wrong. Reality of actually written apps is a way more important factor than such comments, and in that reality the cult of performance is tiny, not crowding out everything else

[mittensc]

> An enormous factor here is the cult of speed.

Application performance is a very important factor. To ignore it is foolish.

[kelseyfrog]

Help me understand how this went from "There are factors other than speed that are important too" to "ignore speed." Would different phrasing conveyed the idea more effectively?