whereiswaldo's Journal: Program efficiency vs. Programmer efficiency

I've been thinking about how programmer time is more valuable than machine time and storage space for awhile now - since machines are so fast today with abundant storage space. In an article by Paul Graham, this paragraph sums it up pretty well:

http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html

"What programmers in a hundred years will be looking for, most of all, is a language where you can throw together an unbelievably inefficient version 1 of a program with the least possible effort. At least, that's how we'd describe it in present-day terms. What they'll say is that they want a language that's easy to program in.

Inefficient software isn't gross. What's gross is a language that makes programmers do needless work. Wasting programmer time is the true inefficiency, not wasting machine time. This will become ever more clear as computers get faster."