The use of "toolkits" and other forms of "reusable" code has brought us to a "programming by committee" approach and resulted in a lot of program bloat. Not many folks still code in assembler, which made very compact, fast executing programs. Those programmers had to write code that would run in the machines of the day.
Now, cheap hardware allows software companies to kludge reusable modules together, in high-level languages, to meet marketing deadlines instead of writing compact, efficient code. Small, efficient programs are quickly vanishing from the scene. Len (who used to program his computers using switches on the front panel with only 64-bytes of memory) --- ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bruce Dayton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "aimcompute" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, November 09, 2001 12:08 PM Subject: Re[2]: Windows XP - Scary! (Was=3 A OT: A computer question...) > aimcompute, > > I've been writing code for 20 years and have never encountered a > company requiring the code to be ineffecient. On the contrary, > programmers are quite capable, without being told, to write > ineffecient code. Most commonly are deadlines, which don't allow the > code to be optimized. The other big problem is that code is very > heavily layered, such that most of the layers were not written by the > programmer trying to do the optimization. They are many times viewed > as black boxes. > > In the old days, hardware was more expensive than software > development, so you had to be very careful to not overtax the > hardware. Today, hardware is quite cheap, so many just rely on > hardware upgrades to make up for ineffecient code. > > Conspiracy? No. > Something else (attitude, economics, ineptitude)? Yes! > > For the ultimate in inefficiency, try checkout out the Palm OS world > to the PocketPC world. PocketPC tries to overcome in hardware, great > waste and inefficiency in software. It is a real eye opener. > > > Bruce Dayton - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
