Comment by maremp

As a programmer, I often stumble upon the performance arguments and pitching technology Y over currently used X "because of better performance, i.e. it's fast".

Sure, the impressive feats of engineering accompanied by a short time to build, sounds good. But how much money and time went into maintaining all the flawed decisions?

The stories of Xerox Alto's first GUI-oriented computer are usually accompanied by how Apple stole it and made it better. To me, this sounds like their speed did not help them ship a great product to the end-users.

JavaScript was prototyped in 10 days, which is impressive. But there are also many jokes using this same fact as a punchline. This quick development was paid many times over by having to deal with poor language decisions. It took another 20 years for the language to start moving and developing in a more developer-friendly direction. And some of it will never be better because it has to be backwards compatible for all browsers that ever existed.

Comparing a "highway" (later edited to the military roadway) from 1942 to construction project in one of the larger cities in the world is not fair. I agree the time it's taking, and the cost is absurd. But the cost of work has drastically changed since, and the 1942 number most likely doesn't account for the fact that it was built by soldiers who are already on the payroll, so there were probably little additional worker expenses. And the standards now are more strict than they used to be.