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Comment by seanw444 | Hacker News Reader

Do you dig your garden with an excavator?

Why are bringing Java into this?

I mean... If I had an excavator it beats using a shovel? This is such a silly "gotcha" analogy because the only reason I wouldn't is cost. And cost is not a reason for tsgo to be slower?

"Would you rather have worse software for literally no benefit?"

We should aim to make software as performant, bug free, feature-complete, and maintainable as is cost effective. It's asinine to argue that software shouldn't be fast, not because of some trade off, but just because someone doesn't need it to be fast for small tasks.

Which, mind you, isn't even the case here. Thousands of businesses use typescript for millions of lines of code. Performance gains can mean tens of thousands of dollars in compute or hardware or time; tons of carbon saved from being emitted.

Yep cost is the reason, allegedly the ts team found go a better language for a port and both using a less ergonomic language and switching target every six months have associated costs

And that's a fine argument to make! But this stupid garden analogy is nonsense.

no, it is the same idea, even if the excavator was magically free there are associated costs like keeping an industrial machine in your garden, danger or heavy machinery and possibly it is going to destroy you garden.

the analogy is not between each specific consequence/cost, it is relative to "single axis optimization" not being a solid strategy

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