Caterpillar

The other day, I mentioned that some performance overhead is acceptable, if it improves developer experience. I'd like to expand on that a bit.

Developer experience is Caterpillar's top priority. Its core premise is that interactive programming is an underutilized technique, which can be used to make software development more fun, intuitive, and thus productive.

But it is not an absolute priority. The other part of Caterpillar's goal is to bring this improved developer experience to many places, many use cases. And that means, we need good performance. Developer experience is more important, overall, but that does not mean that every gain in developer experience is worth every cost in performance.