Lifes Too Short, or why using anything but C++ is insulting to your users

I was watching a presentation from altdevblog about C# for games (I hope it takes the gaming world by storm, C# is beautiful).  Repeatedly, when discussing "hard" concepts (callbacks, manual memory management, threading) the author (Miguel) would qualify the difficulty, and the expected debugging nightmares and resulting ripping out of hair of doing hard things in software with "lifes too short".  Really great talk about Mono in the game world, it is a really ingenious platform especially since it supports everything ever.

I think it is a dangerous sentiment.  It basically says do things the easy way because it is a mountain to climb.  While I will agree on the intent, that developers should trade efficiency and determinism for time and ease of development.  Which is great, especially in games.  Maybe not in services.  And definitely not in kernels.  It is not a black and white case of just use the high level language to save time, it is a debate between the difficulties of building a project and the amount of work it is expected to perform.

This actually applies to games.  A single player without multiplayer can reasonably just throw C# at the problem and crank the game out quickly.  If it only lasts 30 - 40 hours, in a computing environments lifetime, that is peanuts.  But when you build a game meant to last hundreds of hours, you are actually not just costing cycles on your users machines, but you are wasting their time in exchange for your own, and the resources to power the redundant cycles, and the time of those who produce the power to run the machines.  It isn't just about developer productivity, but about everyones optimal use of time.

So I look at opportune shortcuts as a question of cost - it is why I would almost always look at C++ when thinking of some mass market product, but I'd look at Python for anything niche.  And I'd look at C# to produce business software, or non-service continually running processes.  Everything has a use case and a cost, so just thinking about ones own life being short might be a short sighted justification for paying a performance cost.

Also, I think this was the most flamebait title I have written yet.  Yay.