portability vs efficency

A case can be made that it is more important for an application to be portable than it is to be efficent. Platforms eventually change, and if an application is portable it can easily be moved to the new platform, but if is not protable it becomes very expensive to rewrite it.

Portablility of an application can be achieved by using open standards and standard languages like C or C++ or platform agnostic languages like Java or Perl. If using C or C++, one needs to avoide proprietary libraries and non ANSI extentions. These proprietary libraries and extentions are mostly used to make the application efficent.

In addition, dat needs to be portable also (a Key point I think). This can be achieved by using text files (and in this modern age XML files - which are still text files).