I remember a chapter or half a chapter in a compiler construction book or article that was effectively titled "Why spend time on compiler optimization", a delightfully ambiguous term. The point was that doing so sped up the compiler which saved time for a large number of users (this was back in the days of compilers as commercial products). Clearly the discussion was targeted to self-compiling compilers.

But the lesson here would be that some effort spent on the speed of compile could positively impact developer productivity or at least negatively affect swordfight time. And yes, I think that very short compile times, like you see in CL (sbcl as an example) or Smalltalk can have an avalanche effect on development. And yes I do believe that small incremental changes are th3e best way to do software development. And yes I would expect to recompile a function in a running image serving web pages as a routine part of development.

But maybe that is just me.