Agreed. Pride of craftsmanship (like anything else, if not taken to an unproductive extreme) is worthwhile.
Also, and I almost posted this on the other thread, these problems are just plain interesting and intellectually challenging. Many hours and many pages have been devoted to the Knight's Tour problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight's_tour). Like a discussion of the fastest way to add two numbers one of which is most likely zero, it has "nothing to do with the real-life problem" -- it its case, the "real problem" being winning a chess match. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John Gilmore Sent: Monday, February 17, 2014 2:08 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Optimization, CPU time, and related issues My objection to sentiments like . . . as the hardware has gotten faster and faster, it is tempting to think that optimization and CPU time no longer matter. is of a different sort. They erode the notion that craftsmanship is important. It is easy to make fun of attempts to shave a µsec from the CP time of an I/O-bound transaction, but it remains important to try to get things right during development. The prayerbook's 'sure and certain hope of resurrection to eternal life' is not so widespread as it once was, but we can be very sure that entropy and maintenance will make things worse. In general, blunders aside, things are better out of the box than they will ever be again. Thus, while there is certainly a perspective from which these discussions are silly, they may be helpful if some guidance for writing new code comes out of them. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
