Conspiracy Theory #1

[Bill Baxter]

On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 2:05 PM, BCS <none at anon.com> wrote:
> Hello Travis,
>
>> Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>
>>> Today that reality is very visible already from certain spots. I've
>>> recently switched fields from machine learning/nlp research to
>>> web/industry. Although the fields are apparently very different, they
>>> have a lot in common, along with the simple adage that obsession with
>>> performance is a survival skill that (according to all trend
>>> extrapolations I could gather) is projected to become more, not less,
>>> important.
>>>
>>> Andrei
>>>
>> Except in the web world performance is network and parallelism (cloud
>> computing). Much less code efficiency, much more programmer
>> productivity (which currently is mutually exclusive, but doesn't have
>> to be)
>>
>
> Even if you have network parallelism, CPU loads still costs money. Many
> server farms are not space limited but power limited. They can't get enough
> power out of the power company to run more servers. (And take a guess at
> what there power bills cost!)

The rise of cloud computing does make an interesting case for fast code.
When you've got your own server that's under-utilized anyway, you may
be ok with CPU-hungry code.
But to the cloud provider, every watt of consumption costs, and every
cycle used for one client is a cycle that can't be used for another.
So you're going to pass those costs on at some point.

Probably for a while most cloud customers will be happy about the
savings they get from not having to maintain their own servers.
But eventually they'll be looking for further savings, and see that
code that runs %50 faster gives them a direct savings of %50.  If they
can get that just by switching to another language, which is almost as
easy to use as what they already use, you'd think they would be
interested.

--bb