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."

Comments

If feature X were important, we'd code in Y

[wintermute42]

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).