begin quoting guy keren as of Thu, Aug 24, 2006 at 12:20:52AM +0300: > [snip] > no all types of applications can assume what you're claiming. there are > applications where performance matters a lot.
This is why we try to assign words to different programs. Are we talking about systems programming (OS & tools)? Application programming? Business programming? Games programming? Computational programming? > further more, you should remember that "far more precious" depends on > who you're asking. Yes. To a thesis advisor, the grad student's time is cheap. To a research professor working on a supercomputer, computer time is expensive. If we're looking for general rules, however, we need to look at the general cases -- and there, programmers aren't cheap, and programmer errors are, or can be, disproportionately expensive. > if one programmer writes a program that is used by 1,000,000 users, then > the time of those 1,000,000 users is far more precious then the time of > this one programmer. if, by spending X more days, this one programmer > could save Y (>> X) days for the 1,000,000 users all together - > determining what is preferable is not as obvious as you're making it > look. I'd rather have that programmer spend X more days testing and fixing bugs and UI issues. Saving me ten seconds of computation time isn't worth it if I can lock up my system with an ill-advised mouseclick. I have a system right now where if I run a debugger and change to a different virtual desktop, I lock the system. As in 120-bounce time. This does not make me happy. No doubt[1] the system instablity was justified by pointing out how performance is more important than just about anything else... -- _ |\_ \| [1] standard rhetorical device meaning "I'm making this up because it sounds good" -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
