programmers no longer need to worry about performance. In fact, we stopped worrying about performance once we abandoned C++ for Java!
Speak for yourself... Maybe you work in a world where the datasets are small, and hardware budgets grow quickly.... I remember digging into a third party package that we were using - they had recently ported from c to java, and the performance of the new version sucked on certain operations. Examination of the code revealed that there was one method that got its result by opening a random file reader on a 200K file, and finding the appropriate bits. The algorithm called this method several hundred times per operation. A simple change to a hashtable based approach with a one-time read of the file resulted in an operation that ran about 1000 times faster. Multiple that by the 500,000,000 times I needed to call that method, and we start talking years instead of hours to process the same data....
Dan
