I don't agree on the last. In the "real world" that I am familiar with, performance is often irrelevant. Lots of programs get written that don't need to run fast or don't do enough work for performance to be an issue.
Well, if we're talking "programs" as opposed to administration glue scripts, I see very few fields where performance doesn't matter. It matters for online apps. It matters for GUI applications. It matters for games. It matters for scientific software. Operating systems. Embedded apps. I suppose there are some enterprise business niche software fields somewhere where it doesn't matter -- until someone decides to write some competing software and sell it, that is.
Wow, quite the load of BS ego there. The average page in the wide-wide world is seldom visited and its performance doesn't matter. There are any number of GUI programs I use that are just utilities whose performance matters very little. And, yes, there is plenty of business software that needs to do its job correctly but where the performance is unimportant, or nearly so.
Kind of disappointed in HN for rating you up. Just goes to show...
Not least because better performance means less money spent on hardware, power, cooling, less space occupied in the datacentre, etc etc.
Joe Hacker might not care about performance of his scripts on his VM he's got from a hosting provider, but you can bet they care a great deal about how many VMs they can fit on one physical host.
