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Comment by friendly_chap

12 years ago

"I'm getting pretty sick of hearing this"

I hope I don't prove to be too detrimental to your health.

"Developer time is often more expensive, but it's always a one-off cost. Machine costs are ongoing. Machines can also impose hard limits on scalability."

A one off cost? I have never seen a codebase which gained consciousness, became self operating, fixed the bugs in itself and implemented new features, I hope I will, that's gonna be a truly glorious moment for humanity.

"Ever play a computer game?"

I did, but Go is rarely used for creating games. Typical use case: backend server services.

"In the meantime if you're working on an MVP, by all means optimise for developer time. In that context it's almost always the right decision."

Yes! On this site most people are working on some startup which will fail in 2 years. Performance is barely an issue.

>A one off cost? I have never seen a codebase which gained consciousness, became self operating, fixed the bugs in itself and implemented new features, I hope I will, that's gonna be a truly glorious moment for humanity.

No, but I've seen lots of projects who were completed, shrink wrapped, and shipped, with the team disbanded or moving on to other projects (sometimes with a few people left behind for bug fixing).

Especially most large scale enterprise /government / organisational projects are mostly one off, fire and forget affairs. A large team is assembled to create them, and then the support is offloaded to smaller team for fixes (and some tacked-on new features), and they run for decades on end.

>I did, but Go is rarely used for creating games. Typical use case: backend server services.

Which is bedide the point. The discussion was about those "programming principles" Rob Pike put forward, and the costs of developer vs machine etc -- not about Go in the least.