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I am a programmer. Started way way back programming 8086's in machine language 'cause that's what was around... Even did some web stuff in assembly 'cause that was the fastest way to do it. These days programmers don't seem to feel the need to make stuff run efficiently. They use resources like they're nothing and when something is slow they use more machines... sure, that's a solution, but in my opinion not a very good one. It makes huge monsters of programs with unreadable code and patches upon patches upon patches...
A web programmer needs to know a server-side scripting and a client side one. Of course, you don't need the client side per se, but the power of thousands of computers ran by the visitors can make a site faster than doing all the math on the server. At the same time doing the same calculations over and over again for every single user when you don't have to doesn't make sense. So it's never easy to decide to do something server/client side. I use PHP for the server, and a combination of MySQL ('cause of it's HUGE flexibility and enormous possibilities in queries) and Redis ('cause of it's mere speed, thehun for instance is ran in PHP using Redis as the Database, life from the DB, no other caching. We also run our banner rotation in PHP/Redis, rotation, geo/device targeting, stats, all live, and all in PHP/Redis). On the client site I use a lot of jQuery, which is basically a layer over JavaScript. Very useful if you use it right.
I'd rather spend 2 days figuring out how to make a program run faster or how to get a query more effective than to spend any time on a new server.
A little example of what strikes me as a programmer these days: sites that server video at 76 times the speed (and higher) of the video... How can someone watch a video at 76 it's original speed? Stuff like that is just stupid to me... People burn resources like they're nothing, and up to a certain point they're right of course, but the real programmers, the codes from the old days that have speed in mind, they're rare these days... people rather play around with WorldPress or whatever, which is great for some things, but not for most...
A simple example from this post, can't remember the exact code, but it came down to this:
$v=7
$retval=($v==7)?true:false;
this is a waste of resources... the ($v==7) already results in a true or false... And this is just a small thing. I used to work on inner-loops of game engines, trying to get rid of for-loops 'cause the 'checking if the counter reached 0 yet' 'caused an extra cache-miss in the CPU... ok, agreed, that was really going very far, but that's probably why we never used more than one machine for thehun...
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