Re: Re: OT: Use Perl wisely and cleverly

A healthy appreciation of resources is a good thing IMHO.

The system I work with is hellishly ignorant of the resources (disk and CPU) available to it and very inefficient because of it.

We've got several Tb of disk, but waiting for huge files to be written to disk takes an age - I wish some people at least try to keep things sensible.
We do actually run out of disk space - this is bad, and shouldn't happen.

I think it might depend on each programmer - some people automatically produce neat/beautiful/efficient solutions out of the box, others just seem to say "what the hell, there's loads of space!".

Things still have to work and scale.

Before, on the older machines, you wouldn't be able to compile poor code, now the problems are deferred until the volume testing or production phases if someone doesn't think about these things carefully.

Cheers.

BazB.

If the information in this post is inaccurate, or just plain wrong, don't just downvote - please post explaining what's wrong.
That way everyone learns.

Comment on Re: Re: OT: Use Perl wisely and cleverly

Replies are listed 'Best First'.

Re: OT: Use Perl wisely and cleverly
by skx (Parson) on Feb 22, 2003 at 00:55 UTC

I agree that there's an enormous difference between the size and simplicity of some peoples code - partly this is due to skill, practise and ability.

Sometimes it's background too.

I started programming in BASIC around 15 years ago on a ZX Spectrum, from this I moved on to Z80 machine code, then onto x86 machine code.

For a very long time I was the producer of prematurely optimized code regardless of the implementation language. There would be little tiny loops of functionality optimized for speed, or size, scattered throught the code - things would be unrolled for performance, and generally everything was a pain to modify.

Then after reading 'Code Complete', and a few other related books, I achieved some enlightenment. Since then I've been mostly restrained; only optimizing the code which measurably needs it.

When I get bored I'll write a version of life in 80 bytes of x86 assembly; that usually works it out of my system, failing that I'll decompile a random binary, and play around with it's internals..

Optimization for me is a very introverted activity which is immensley attractive. At times it's enjoyable, at times it's painful, but I nearly always learn something new, and I usually enjoy the experience.

For the average programmer optimization doesn't have a place in 99% of the code they'll write. (This is both a good thing, and a bad thing).

Laziness, Hubris, and Simplicity are indeed the way to code. Optimize only when you need to, and only then after thinking of algorithmic changes.

steve.org.uk

[reply]


good chemistry is complicated, and a little bit messy -LW
	PerlMonks