Attack of the killer workstations

[jle $#at#$ world.std.com (Joe M Leonard)]

Reviewing the recent discussion regarding C vs. Fortran and structured vs.
 spagetti coding, isn't it reasonable to consider the time of the programmer
 as more important that the code's runtime (within reason)?  Given that
 approx. $20k workstations are comparable to Cray machines, isn't 10-ish%
 overhead more than worth the human time savings through better-thought-
 out programming (structured, modular, OO, etc.)?  I hope the day's past
 for really needing to count cycles in loops - as one can wait for the next
 version of workstation xxx to gain appreciable speedups.
 Obviously, this isn't the case for mpp machines, for which the consensus is
 that one must rethink and/or reimplement algorithm's in order to use
 the hardware to advantage.  Still, this might prove to be an example where
 clearer coding styles might turn out to be a win after all...
 Joe Leonard
 jle $#at#$ world.std.com