On 8/30/07, Dave McGuire <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Aug 30, 2007, at 9:26 PM, Timothy Normand Miller wrote: > > I'm no longer obsessed with maximizing performance of the machine. > > Now, I want to maximize my performance as a programmer. > > Be very, very careful with that attitude. Back in the 1970s, some > blithering idiot came up with the idea that programmer time is more > important than processor time. This has given rise to things like > Windows, which takes hundreds of megabytes of RAM and multi-GHz > processors to do even the very simplest of things. That moron back > in the 1970s (whoever it was) should be put up against a wall and shot.
Well, don't misinterpret me. I still like to write tight, efficient code. And in fact, Ruby makes that easier, I believe. If you were to rewrite that same code in C++, it would be faster and not require the Ruby runtime environment. But it would take a heck of a lot longer to code and be much more difficult to modify. (Or course, if everything were writtn in Ruby, the VM memory overhead would amortize out.) I took a computational linguistics class last Spring quarter, and I decided to do the class project (an Earley parser) in Ruby. A direct port of the Java program to Ruby was remarkably slower. However a bit of profiling and some other clever optimizations later (not all mine--another student was using Ruby too and shared some ideas), and I was beating the best time of any Java program by an order of magnitude. Ok, so sure, I spent extra time working on it, but that's okay, because it was FUN. :) The lesson: Profilers are your friends. -- Timothy Normand Miller http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti Open Graphics Project _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
