Is it me or does Hardy run like a pig?

[Derek Broughton]

Ignazio Palmisano wrote:

> Emanoil Kotsev wrote:
>> Knapp wrote:
>> 
> [snip]
>>>
>>> There is also a huge shift in how people code. When I wrote code for a
>>> C64 we would spend a week going over the machine code to remove a few
>>> bytes. Now when I code I go over it and make the code longer so that
>>> it is clearer for debugging and maintenance.
...
>> Thanks for mentioining this. I think it's really the problem and the real
>> problem is the mentality behind ... as you said 'I don't care because my
>> machine .... '
>> 
>> Each and every programmer should care about code optimization.
>> 
>> I think younger programmers who did almost never code in C (they are
>> usually using modern scripting language like python) tend to not think
>> too much about what they are actually doing at low level
>> 
>> as a result all of us suffer
>> 
>> very very sad
>> 
> 
> I am forced to cite Donald Knuth here, back from the seventies:
> premature optimization is the root of all evil :)

Nobody forced you! :-)  Donald Knuth has always been one of my software
icons, and a very wise man.

> the design is what 
> must be honed over and over again, the details of the code come into
> play only very late in the game. Knapp said:
> 
> "Then there are all the new languages. They make coding faster and less
> buggy but they don't make it more efficient or smaller."
> 
> Faster is not more efficient? 

I agree.  While I often pine for the days I coded, efficiently, in C or
assembler, I can buy a lot of memory for the cost of a day spent optimizing
my code.

-- 
derek