Save hardware costs or programmer costs? Arguments against 'performant' code

[textile]I was struggling to find where I'd read this before... I spent ages trying to find the source of the quote...

A typical project will spend about twenty times as much on people than on hardware. That means a project spending 2 million dollars on programmers per year will spend about 100 thousand dollars on computer equipment each year. Let's say that we are smart programmers and we find a way to save 20% of the hardware costs by some very clever programming tricks. It will make the source code harder to understand and maintain, but we are saving 20% or 20 thousand dollars per year, a big savings. Now what if instead we wrote our programs such that they were easy to understand and extend. We could expect to save no less than 10% of our people costs. That would come to 200 thousand dollars, a much bigger savings. This is certainly something your customers will notice.

from "XP: A change is Coming":http://www.extremeprogramming.org/change.html Now it's on my blog, I won't have to look so hard next time.