Erik,

>I think that you're right to an extent, but are ignoring an important factor. The relative price of fast hardware has dropped significantly in the last 10 years, while the costs of software development have only escalated. Most of my clients would rather pay to upgrade the RAM on a few machines than pay me to spend a week trying to eke a little more efficiency out of my program by doing things like de-objectifying or writing unintuitive code that makes the application more expensive to maintain.

That is fine when you're speaking of about 1 to 10 clients, but the particular case I often encounter is that it requires to upgrade about hundreds of machines on different locations. Not only the costs of hardware must be counted, but also the resources to actually do the upgrades.

I think my case is not that rare, and if in this situation, it might justify carefull and efficient programming. It also has the advantage that when doing the upgrade your product run even faster and leave more room to do resource intensive enhancements.

Walter,