8 Apr
2009
8 Apr
'09
4:31 a.m.
On 7 Apr 2009 at 20:25, Richard wrote:
There's an in-depth understanding and then
there's wasting time
learning details that don't matter. Where the line is drawn depends
on the task at hand and the needs driving the software. There are
times where "slow and simple" is the design win, not "I understand
what every bit of my 400 MB executable is doing!".
No, but there's a line at "I'm a (C++, Java, name-your-poison))
programmer. "I don't care about the machine architecture or
instruction set because the compiler handles all that for me. If the
code doesn't run fast enough, I tell the client to get a faster
machine."
Sometimes there is no faster machine. I remember working on a
proposal back in the dark ages (we didn't get the contract) for
ECMWF (European Medium Range Weather Forecasts) and chatting with one
of the customer's technical people. His statement "Your system is
very nice, but we could really use something about a thousand times
faster" really hit me.
Of course, that was when 100 MFlop was very fast, not something you'd
find on a slow GPU.
--Chuck