On Wednesday, 31 July 2013 at 22:58:32 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
On Wednesday, 31 July 2013 at 21:40:45 UTC, Bill Baxter wrote:
Are you serious that you can't fathom how it could be
confusing to someone
than talking about differences in run times?
If you say something is faster than something else you want
the two numbers
to be something you can relate to. Like MPH. Everyone has a
clear concept
of what MPH is. We use it every day. So to say 25 MPH is 25%
faster than
20 MPH is perfectly clear. But nobody talks about program
execution speed
in terms of programs per second. So I think it's pretty clear
why that
would be harder for people to grok than changes in car speeds
or run times.
It's a quite impressively unbalanced education that provides
understanding of memory allocation strategies, hashing and the
performance pitfalls of integer division, but not something as
basic as a speed.
To be fair, that is the only item of the list that involve
complicated like division.
