On Wed, May 10, 2006 at 03:10:51AM -0500, Gabriel Sechan wrote:
> 
> Moore's law is a complete strawman.  It doesn't speed up existing hardware. 
> Nor do we get anywhere near a 30% performance boost every 6 months (or even 
> the every 18 of Moore's law fame).  Memory latency and bandwidth are the 
> bottleneck these days, and Moore doesn't help them much.  If you were to 
> tell my employer we needed to buy 30% more boxes, with all associated costs 
> in hosting and maintenance, they'd fire me.
> 

THANK you!

> And I do say that about interpreted languages as well.
> 

What?!! Back off, bub!

OK, not quite that, but interpreted languages like perl and Tcl (can't
speak to the others) are quite fast when excessive looping and
computation are avoided; in Tcl (at least) when computation or looping
become a bottleneck, the routine can be rewritten in C/C++ and made a
Tcl command; and the developer time saved in prototyping and developing
far outweighs in cost any runtime "delays" (usually a matter of a 1.5
sec wait instead of a .05 sec wait, if that) that the users cumulatively
suffer.

Reaching for C as a knee-jerk choice is the mark of an inexperienced
manager. And if you _must_ use C all the time, why aren't you using an
assembler?

-- 
Lan Barnes                    [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Linux Guy, SCM Specialist     858-354-0616
Tcl/Tk Enthusiast 


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