Back at dear old SJU, John Gagliardi (recent inductee to the College Football Hall of Fame) was fond of saying “speed kills.” Of course this was in relation to quick footed running backs or wide receivers but the adage works in other contexts as well. As I mentioned earlier, Uncle Bob has been getting into the Ruby space and today he posted a very interesting comparison of the speed of an algorithm written in Java, C++, and Ruby. While Ruby code is relatively slow (and the C++ wasn’t highly optimized) there’s more to this game than raw processing speed.
I’m not saying we should write slow code - far from it. But, there are other considerations such as developer productivity and long term maintenance costs. While there certainly are some applications that absolutely *must* run full bore, I suspect quite a few businesses would take a moderately slower application if it meant their development staff could deliver working code faster. And I can’t second this notion fast enough:
I’d rather have simple, clean, maintainable code over even 1.5 orders of magnitude in many cases.
Amen.
