In other situations, your efficiency could be measured by how little memory is used, or how little storage is used, or how easily your peers understand your code, (they might not be perlmonks). Another measurement of efficiency is how long it takes you to write the code (trading machine time for programmer time).

...

I believe that in this case, the "efficiency" of this program is better judged as the speed of transfering the output (i.e. bandwidth) or how long it would take to find information in it using an editor / browser. This is mostly because it uses a small amount of processing power and because it only needs to be run once.

You so beat around the bush with this statement. efficiency only comes down to one general thing: resources.

Which ones you have, don't have, need back and want back. Your script runs in 30 seconds, 15 seconds to compile and 15 seconds to execute. Is it efficient? What are your time constraints, your memory constraints? What about disk storage constraints? No use of saying your program is great if it can't fit on your hard drive. Also in writing output. If your program uses data files that get too big, too fast, well, it's useless. A final example is your screen. I've had programs that won't allow for resize with ncurses beyond 80x25. Efficient use of screen? Nope. I just "wasted" a large chunk of screen when I didn't want to.

I think I've driven the point home. Efficiency is all about your needs and wants in measurement of resouces. So don't limit yourself one way, because some day, you may hurt yourself trying to make things great in one direction, but not in the others.


Play that funky music white boy..

In reply to Re: Types of Efficiency by exussum0
in thread Types of Efficiency by David Caughell

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