There's more to performance than just what a programmer can do by optimizing its code. This is particularly important on that type of software which performance is also dependent on user input, or on software that is supposed to be scalable. So the quote "Algorithms are for people who don't know how to buy RAM" deserves a little more attention than what some of you guys have been giving it.

It's not stupid, it's not the worst thing you ever heard. It's actually quite, in fact, true!

There's so much a programmer can achieve in terms of code optimization, much of which is well documented and easily understood. There's very few secrets concerning code optimization these days. Particularly on well-known and proven areas of development. Any code displaying less than optimal optimization is pretty much understood these days as either a strategy (maintenance concerns, etc), laziness on behalf of the programmer, or inexperience. Not the product of some secret knowledge available only to a few.

Optimization is, for the most part, taken away from us and put on the hand of the compiler, the operating system and the hardware. Those are the real agents of performance on our modern systems. Our saying (assuming of course good quality code) was pretty much limited.

Now, with only a limited capacity for optimization, it's pretty easy to understand that hardware scalability comes into play in terms of what one can or cannot do to actually increase the performance of our software. Instead of relying oneself on wasting time over-optimizing our code to achieve some performance goal that may actually be unattainable, we greatly reduce costs and achieve much better results by increasing the capabilities of our hardware. And that's where this quote fits in.

And who says RAM, says CPU, or any other relevant piece of hardware. A few microseconds attained by some very smart code optimization technique that took weeks to achieve and introduced new code maintenance problems, cannot ever replace the elegance and simplicity of an hardware upgrade. And will never compete with it on software that is meant to scale.

>> But programmers, like yourself, are uneducated. "Optimization" is what you do to an already optimal algorithm, to speed it up in a given platform/hardware.

And with this you pretty much denounce your own lack of education. Not just the fact you choose to insult people you disagree with, but also the fact your obviously do not really understand what you are talking about.

If you choose to call code optimization "what you do to an already optimized algorithm", I feel obliged to point you to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_optimization

In there you will hopefully learn that choosing the appropriate algorithm is also part of the optimization procedure. But contrary to what you want to indicate, the choice of an appropriate algorithm is not always straightforward since often you'll find yourself compromising on other aspects of performance; is it faster but uses more memory? Is it slower but has a small footprint? Since these algorithms are proven, you don't have many chances (if any) of optimizing them any further. Yet, when you are faced with these questions, the decision must be made on what you need to compromise.

And then there's those algorithms you design yourself for those non-generic needs, where the level of optimization is decided by you as you are developing. When will you stop optimizing your algorithm? When you are satisfied with the results? Or when you cannot do any more optimization? If the former, congratulations! You made your way into the real world of professional programming. If the latter, unless there's a concrete reason to spend your time with your algorithm (e.g. you are coding a performance-critical application), you will hardly find anyone sympathetic with you. Much less your boss.

And its in this context that quote fits in. RAM, CPU, Hard-Drive, all can contribute for better performance in ways that your coding skills cannot by the simple reason the programming language semantics limit what you can do. It's not an invitation to write bad code or to make poor decisions; it's the reassurance that once you write good code and make good choices, the hardware will do more for your application than any extra bit of added performance you can extract from your code.

I hope, if you choose to reply to this, you avoid the insults. The level of emotional response you put into this topic has the opposite effect than you think; It does not intimidate and does make you look insecure about your own thoughts.