Development time vs. runtime performance (was: Fibonacci series recursion error)

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 2:34 AM, Teemu Likonen <tlikonen at iki.fi> wrote:
> But of course "development time" is a nicely vague concept. Depending on
> the argument it can include just the features of language and
> implementation. Other times it could include all the available resources
> such as documentation, library archives and community mailing lists. All
> these can reduce development time.
>

And it also includes a developer's personal experience level. A good
programmer will have a mental "algorithmic library" if you like;
effectively, it's a gigantic hash table of "if I need to do this, I
can do it this way". A mediocre programmer will both take longer and
produce less efficient code than an awesome programmer. This is
primarily not a language feature, but a language that usually has one
obvious way to do things will likely be easier to grok than a language
that has myriad "gotchas" to work around.

Chris Angelico