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Programming As If Performance Mattered
Junks Jerzey writes "Saw the essay 'Programming as if Performance Mattered', by James Hague, mentioned at the Lambda the Ultimate programming language weblog. This is the first modern and sensible spin on how optimization has changed over the years. The big 'gotcha' in the middle caught me by surprise. An inspiring read." Hague begins: "Are particular performance problems perennial? Can we never escape them? This essay is an attempt to look at things from a different point of view, to put performance into proper perspective."
is that ms word 4 did all I need
And you aren't still using it why?
(hint--your answer is the reason why MS 4 doesn't do all you need.)
the newest office is a thousand times the size and uses so much more cpu and ram but does no more.
Wrong. Office does a LOT more. Tasks that used to require running a specific process now run idly in the background, multiple times in-between keystrokes. If my PC falls behind me in typing now, I know that there's a problem--not just that I'm typing too fast.
Of course, the world would be a cleaner place if MS made up their minds between "easy to use" and "powerful", instead of trying to be both and failing miserably at each.
The economist Brian Arthur is one of the proponents of the theory of path dependence. In path dependence something is adopted for reasons that might be determined by chance (e.g., the adoption of MS/DOS) or by some related feature (C became popular in part because of UNIX's popularity).
The widespread use of C and C++, languages without bounds checking in a world where we can afford bounds checking, is not so much a matter of logical decision as history. C became popular, C++ evolved from C and provided a some really useful features (objects, expressed as classes). Once C++ started to catch on, people used C++ because others used it and an infrastructure developed (e.g., compilers, libraries, books). In sort, the use of C++ is, to a degree, a result of path dependence. Once path dependent characteristics start to appear, choices are not necessarily made on technical virtue. In fact, one could probably say that the times when we make purely rational, engineering based decisions (feature X is important so I'll use language Y) are outweighed by the times when we decide on other criteria (my boss say's we're gonna use language Z).
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
How is this fair? He completely and utterly changed the entire assignment on you forcing you to throw all of your work away. And gave you one week for it!?
He sounds just like my boss.