From: bowman@montana.com
On Fri, 26 Dec 2025 18:12:00 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> On 2025-12-26, Nuno Silva wrote:
>
>> On 2025-12-25, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
>>
>>> On Thu, 25 Dec 2025 21:05:10 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>>
>>>> BTW my first programming job, in 1970, was on a machine with 16K of
>>>> memory and nothing but cards (disks and tapes came along later).
>>>> Yet somehow we managed to run accounts receivables, payrolls, and
>>>> general ledgers for offices all over town.
>>>
>>> Hardware was expensive back then, and programmers were cheap.
>>
>> That's not an excuse to stop worrying about performance.
>>
>> Hardware is still expensive nowadays, it's just that it became a tad
>> bit easier to get computing machinery, but it's still something
>> expensive that a lot of people on the universe don't have a wallet to
>> afford. Others do, but that also doesn't mean they can't criticize lack
>> of performance.
>>
>> Take for example the amazing insistence seen in using 3D effects and
>> animations in some UI design. That is at the very least annoying with
>> hardware where it runs flawlessly, and easily becomes very degrading
>> performance-wise once you walk past that threshold of the few
>> combinations where it works well.
>>
>>
>> Discarding the worry because "hardware was expensive back then" is like
>> only quoting a small part of that Knuth remark on optimization to
>> possibly convey the opposite point (the whole quote is in support of
>> optimization, and IIRC merely a criticism of unguided optimization
>> efforts (hence the "*premature*".))
>
> In three words: Abundance justifies waste.
One of the turn-offs of Java for me is when they rolled out Swing rather
than the original AWT. When you mentioned your Swing project was slower
than a ruptured sloth the answer was 'get a machine with more RAM and a
faster processor.' I haven't tried it lately but Java based IDEs like
Eclipse were pigs.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
|
