I'm reading a book on Groovy, a JVM language. It uses the word
"spike" to signify a quick hack, see the quote below.
The Groovy community is primarily European. So I ask my Friam
brothers, euro or other, .. is this a term you are familiar with?
Quote:
Before Groovy, I used other scripting languages (preferably Ruby) to
sketch some design ideas, do a *spike*(1), and maybe even run a
functional prototype. The downside was that I was never really sure
if what I was writing would also work in Java. Worse, in the end I
had the work of porting it over or redo it from scratch. With Groovy,
I can do all the exploration work directly on my target platform
Example: Some days ago Guillaume and I did a *spike* on prime number
disassembly(2). We started with a small Groovy solution that did the
job cleanly, but not efficiently. Using Groovy’s interception
capabilities, we unit-tested the solution and counted the number of
operations. Since the code was clean, it was a breeze to optimize the
solution and decrease the operation count. It would have been much
more difficult to recognize the optimization potential in Java code.
The final result can be used from Java as it stands and while we
certainly still have the option of porting the optimized solution to
plain Java, which would give us another performance gain, we can
defer the decision until the need arises.
(1) a programming experiment to assess the feasibility of a task
(2) every ordinal number N can be uniquely disassembled into factors
that are prime numbers N = p1*p2*p3. The disassembly problem is known
to be 'hard'. Its complexity guards cryptographic algorithms like the
popular Rivest- Shamir-Adleman (RSA) algorithm.
-- Owen
Owen Densmore http://backspaces.net
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
