Hardware Is Cheap, Programmers Are Expensive

Sportsqs points out a story at Coding Horror which begins: "Given the rapid advance of Moore's Law, when does it make sense to throw hardware at a programming problem? As a general rule, I'd say almost always. Consider the average programmer salary here in the US. You probably have several of these programmer guys or gals on staff. I can't speak to how much your servers may cost, or how many of them you may need. Or, maybe you don't need any — perhaps all your code executes on your users' hardware, which is an entirely different scenario. Obviously, situations vary. But even the most rudimentary math will tell you that it'd take a massive hardware outlay to equal the yearly costs of even a modest five person programming team."

Comments

Re:That depends on your problem

[Creepy Crawler]

Have you thought about a functional language , so that you could just add X computers with Y cores and Z memory? I'm still learning Erlang, but to a point I can write neat servers that auto scale and balance.

Once you run the interpreter on each machine (one could use Damn Small Linux as your backbone) and set the network key: on erlang, it is
erlang:set_cookie(node(), password).

And it will push your code between so that things just work. As for the interpreted argument, look at Yaws, the Erlang web server. This convinced me.