13 Aug
2006
13 Aug
'06
9:02 p.m.
Sean Conner wrote:
It was thus said that the Great Don once stated:
Yes and no. What I was optimizing was "make it produce the
correct results (numbers) the first time" (since spotting
any errors would be a painfully tedious manual task, I wanted
to *know* it was bug free from the start).
And, to be honest, I think "we"
(developers, etc.) also take
advantage of the improvements in technology. Laziness creeps
in. E.g., I had to write a nice little search algorithm
to minimize a function. I didn't hesitate to pass int[50]
arrays AS ARGUMENTS to the *recursive* function (e.g.,
it will recurse to a depth of ~50 and each invocation
carries 200 bytes of int[] arguments). Sure, I could
write something more elegant but it's a throw-away
algorithm (to verify some parameters) that I *may* use
twice more in my lifetime??
For your example, it was development speed you were optimizing for, not runtime nor memory usage. The problem though, is that
often times it's the
throw away code that isn't thrown away but instead *becomes* the
application. One company I did some work for, Galacticomm, originally made
hardware (multi-port serial boards for PCs) and included was some sample
programs to show what the hardware could do; one of the programs was a
simple multiuser BBS program.