Regarding the more work, as a sysadmin, it is his job to make the machines run the application.

His salary and benefits are part of the cost using the higher level languages/additional computers. His rant could be taken as "lazy sysadmin" problem, while what he is ranting against was just costs/benefits decision.

True, my rant could be takes as a "lazy sysadmin", but I have a CS degree and have a programming background. Personally, I'd prefer to re-write this code myself in C than see this kind of hardware waste. That's not being lazy, it's being respectful of the power at my disposal. Use the machine's power on doing actual work, don't waste the machine's power on programmatic overhead that could be avoided by making a different choice.

I understand what you are saying, you see that the flight to the moon was done by something equivalent to C64 and today we are allow wasting orders of magnitude more computing power.

What I'm trying to tell you, look at the whole picture. There is a cost associated with writing and maintaing software. That hand optimized assembly application is going to be more expensive (and take longer to deliver) than the Java/c#/whatever equivalent. There is another cost associated with purchasing and operating hardware (that includes paying sysadmins, for example). The business has to consider what is more effective, and usually HL language/more HW is the more efficient solution.

What, more efficient, you say? We were talking about wasting the computer power. Yes, more efficient overall. We have a method for measuring wasting resources - money. You are going either waste some money on hardware/electricity/floor space/sysadmins, or programmers/time to deliver/managing larger team/managing recruiting and retaining competent programmers. Not only is the former cheaper, it is also easier to quantify and manage. It is no wonder, that you do not see companies taking the later approach.

At the end, what most people do not understand (not only technical people, but most people) is that successful enterprise is not a 100% efficient one. There is going to be waste, but it must be in the right spot. Actually, conceptually it is similar to profiling, you don't optimize spots that do not matter in the big picture. And computing power does not matter for most business, it is a cheap resource. People, on the other hand, is not.

Ok, and I've seen Java apps not do that. Argument by anecdote is bankrupt.

Only if your FTEs are very cheap. Most I know wouldn't get out of bed for less than $50k+.

But even if it was half a man-year upfront and one recurring - that's still a no-brainer (remember we're talking an entire rack here, which goes quite a way for most apps). If that rack enables your 5 programmers to work only 10% faster (completely theoretical ofcourse, but for the sake of the argument...) then it has already more than paid for itself.

Your argument is quite old nowadays (I remember the heated efficiency debates in the 90s) and has long been decided. Hardware is so cheap now that in most cases it really is demonstrably more cost effective to throw hardware at certain problems.