Bloat costs

[Wm. Scott `Spot' Draves]

In article <266577FA.6D99 at tct.uucp> chip at tct.uucp (Chip Salzenberg) writes:
   According to jtc at van-bc.UUCP (J.T. Conklin):

   >On the other hand, there is something to be said about giving
   >beginning programmers 6 MHz Xenix/286 machines to work on.

   Amen.

If you are suggesting that novice programmers be given slow/obsolete
hardware so that they learn to write efficient code, I would disagree
with you strongly.

Efficiency is just one of many attributes that are generally
desirable in programs.  Learning to program on a machine that is
slower than the state of the art will artificially skew the importance
of eff. programming.

One of the wonderful things about 20Mip 32Mb workstations is that I
don't have to worry about eff. when writing most code.  I can
concentrate on other issues such as clarity of code, speed of
execution, speed of development, fancy features, ...

by "eff." i mean "frugal of code and data".

--

Scott Draves		Space... The Final Frontier
wsd at cs.brown.edu
uunet!brunix!wsd