..out of the dark

A few things have been nagging me lately. I've been taught, and the books essentially say that programming languages pick up popularity when they are portable. The concept isn't very specific, though - java can be very portable and extendable, also in practice, even if it requires you to run the code on a java- machine, and you can't really port the code all that easily. Because conceptually, you're required to use programming practices that all other object- oriented programming languages will support.

You can see this in practice when it comes to online applications, user interfaces, and so on - since concepts and abstractions are being reused across programming packages much more than packages of code.

So in a sense, maybe it's possible to talk about programming technique persistence, and what sort of concepts survive on what areas of program development.

I mean - can (the dreaded all too) early optimsations in a project be defended - if we're using some of these concepts more consciously?