From: Colin Bartlett <colinb2r@...>
Date: 2010-05-14T10:07:56+09:00
Subject: Re: ease of porting (translating) ruby to C (vs. python)?

On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 11:11 PM, Caleb Clausen <vikkous@gmail.com> wrote:
> While one should not get overwrought about performance ahead of time,
> it is something that should be considered at design time. I am not a
> subscriber to the notion that many seem to promote that performance
> should not be considered at all until you prove with benchmarks that
> something is too slow. I don't need to run a bubble-sort to know that
> it's slow.
Seconded!
Some time in the 1920s a famous British aeronautical engineer/theorist
(so famous I can't remember his name!) gave a lecture pointing out
that whilst individual parts of an aeroplane gave rise to perhaps an
extra 3% to 5% drag, the overall effect of the sub-optimal design of
the parts was a serious increase in drag over what it could be reduced
to. (I made the numbers up, but the gist is true.)