Comment by codeaether

The article makes two points—one about software performance, the other about development performance. On the topic of software performance, I think the best explanation I got came from the great Prof. Charles Leiserson’s MIT course on performance engineering: performance is a currency. It’s something we spend to gain other qualities—safety, rich features, user-friendliness, and so on. At the end of the day, a computer can executes about 100 simple primitve instructions. The reason we have a software industry is because of speed.

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-172-performance-engineering-of...