[CLUE-Tech] KISS session tomorrow

[Grant Johnson]

>
>
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>The bottom line is that hardware is fast and cheap, so optimizing isn't as
>important as it used to be.  I have some opinions on kernel compiling too, but I
>see that Dan mentions them in his talk so I'll save them for the meeting.
>
It's that attitude that makes my job hard.  Optimizing is ALWAYS 
important.  
1)  Optimizing, even on fast hardware means you can do more things at 
once for more people at once.
2)  Optimizing for speed usually means finding a simpler way of doing 
things, which in the long run is more maintainable.
3)  Those who take the time to optimize are usually those who care about 
their code and how it works, and usually the ones who actually take to 
do other little things like debugging.

This attitude is why we have what we do today, where my 300 Mhz AMD 
running Excel takes longer to recalc a spreadsheet than a 1Mhz CBM 8032 
running Busicalc, and why my 366 AMD laptop with 96 M or memory and an 
EIDE drive running Postgres outperforms a dual 933 with a gig of memory 
and RAID 5 Ultra 3 SCSI running SQL Server 2000.

Stay away from the dark side.  Write good code.


This is not meant to be a personal attack.  Many people have this 
attitude, it is even the prevailing theory taught in schools now.  That 
doesn't make it right.