[moondowner]

" I could give a rat's ass about performance. I'm trying to find the answer to a question, and if I can get that answer in a reasonable amount of time, then the code is good enough"

This is the only bad point that a lot of people are aligned with.

The more time a program needs to finish, the more time you will need to run it again with some other dataset, and in turn - more time to find the right answer.

I really feel that people with scientific and mathematics background should learn proper programming (not take a course in some language - but have actual experience). Design patterns, data structures, best practices, memory consumption, are all things that should be known before a person starts submitting code for this kind of projects.

[scott_s]

Spending time optimizing a program that you will use once is a waste. Sitting idle while waiting for a program to finish is also a waste. So I think it's reasonable to optimize for programmer time the first time, and then re-visit the design if you discover the code is getting reused and fed larger data sets.

[toufka]

Want to teach us? A bunch of us work right near AT&T park in Mission Bay and would love to learn. Even a long day or two from you guys would be awesome. But as was eluded to, we can't pay you - we're poor as shit - especially when compared with you all.