Your Favorite Programming Language Is Slow

My favourite scripting language is Ruby. And If we speak about execution speed it is not the fastest language around.

Recurrently I see people worrying about this. Comparing their favourite language to others, focusing on this execution speed.

It does not matter.

What matters is how much time you gain by using a particular programming language.

Here are some questions I like to ask myself:

• Is it convenient?
• Is it easy to use?
• Do you enjoy coding with it?
• Are you fast implementing new features?
• How much time does it take you to implement a prototype? (Weeks is a wrong answer)

You never know if a business idea is good before actually testing it. If your idea is really good, people are going to beg for using your software.

You can worry about scalability and speed of execution when you are successful, before that it is just noise.

And anyway (from the Mythical Man Month): When designing a new kind of system, a team will design a throw-away system (whether it intends to or not). This system acts as a “pilot plant” that reveals techniques that will subsequently cause a complete redesign of the system.