On Friday, 2 August 2013 at 17:16:30 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
On 2013-08-02 15:44:13 +0000, Leandro Lucarella said:
I'm not say is right or wrong for people to have this reflex
of thinking
about multipliers, I'm just saying if you care about
transmitting the
message as clear as you can, is better to use numbers
everybody can
intuitively think about.
And this is in reply to Andrei too. I understand your POV, but
if your
main goal is communication (instead of education about side
topics),
I think is better to stick with numbers and language that
minimizes
confusion and misinterpretations.
Just a humble opinion of yours truly.
Fair enough. So what would have been a better way to convey the
quantitative improvement?
Not to speak on Leandro's behalf, but I think the obvious answer
is "Reduced compile times by 43%".
It's much more useful to express it that way because it's easier
to apply. Say I have a program that takes 100 seconds to compile.
Knowing that the compilation time is reduced by 43% makes it easy
to see that my program will now take 57 seconds. Knowing that
compilation is 75% faster doesn't help much at all - I have to
get out a calculator and divide by 1.75.
It's always better to use a measure that is linear with what you
care about. Here, most people care about how long their programs
take to compile, not how many programs they can compile per
second.
