From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2006-09-10T08:38:36+09:00
Subject: Re: Joel Spolsky on languages for web programming

Phlip wrote:
> M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> 
>> Now: would you like to debate whether a Rails programmer can produce at
>> five times the rate of a .NET programmer, given equivalent tools and
>> processes? Or would you like to join me in efforts and advocacy to speed
>> Ruby up, which seems to me a more productive use of time?
> 
> No, I want to provide Joel a Cluebat, with glowing letters on it spelling: 
> "Premature Optimization is the root of all evil".
> 
> In a web app, the bottleneck is the database, so - guess what?! - it's 
> written in C. Anything else is just tuning.
> 
> I will trade CPU cycles for programmer cycles any day.
> 
Well:

1. I don't consider a 4X speed improvement on a matrix multiply and
inverse, which is what I got with YARV over Ruby 1.8.5, "premature
optimization".

2. If the bottleneck is the database, why does Rails frown on stored
procedures, preferring instead to do everything in the ActiveRecord ORM?