On Wed, 2006-08-23 at 14:31 -0700, Stewart Stremler wrote: > 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?
program types of not relevant here - what matters is what a specific program is used for. if a program takes 40 hours to complete instead of 25 hours (just an example i encountered about a 2 weeks ago) - then you'd better make sure it runs fast enough. > > 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. but it's not always optimizing Vs. stability. why won't we just stop adding features, and only work on stability? this has its price too - sometimes a user prefers having some feature, then enhancing stability of an existing feature, because, overall, the new feature will save more time, then will be lost by the existing unstable feature. > > 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. who's talking about saving ten seconds of computations? i didn't. > 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... taking things to the extreme is a sure way to make your argument lost. i am simply trying to point out that using generalizations in a too broad context is not a good idea. --guy -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
