On 06.01.2010 05:47, Albert Schlef wrote:

> Why does everybody say that CPUs are fast nowadays and that "it dosn't
> mattar that language XYZ is slow"?

I have a Core2Dual, with each core clocking in at 2GHz. This is a 
low-end CPU. Do you think I'm bothered about a millisecond, or even 
100ms, for that matter?

The speed of an application isn't just in the language used, but in how 
fast an application appears. If it seems that an application is fast by, 
for example, starting to display data soon enough (in a CRUD app, 
starting to show the first few rows of the result set, while the 
backend's still collecting the whole shebang), is for all intents and 
purposes fast enough.

> It does matter: web applications. If your applications can't serve all
> the visitors, then you're going to lose your customer or you'll have to
> learn some other language with better performance.

Especially in web applications, the speed of your language of choice is 
less relevant than in any other possible scenario. You have about 2 
seconds per unique visitor to build the whole page, before users think a 
website is slow. That's ages.

Now, if we talk about mobile devices, then CPU and memory constraints 
start to reappear. But not on the desktop and the intertubes.

--
Phillip Gawlowski