this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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Ah yes, those precious precious CPU cycles. Why spend one hour writing a python program that runs for five minutes, if you could spend three days writing it in C++ but it would finish in five seconds. Way more efficient!
Because when it is to actually get paid work done, all the bloat adds up and that 3 days upfront could shave weeks/months of your yearly tasks. XKCD has a topic abut how much time you can spend on a problem before effort outweighs productivity gains. If the tasks are daily or hourly you can actually spend a lot of time automating for payback
And note this is one instance of task, imagine a team of people all using your code to do the task, and you get a quicker ROI or you can multiply dev time by people
That also goes to show why to not waste 3 days to shave 2 seconds off a program that gets run once a week.
Agreed. Or look at the manual effort, is it worth coding it, or just do it manually for one offs. A coworker would code a bunch of mundane tasks for single problems, where I would check if it actually will save time or I just manually manipulate the data myself.