Bloat costs

[Bill Meahan]

In article <WSD.90Jun1130958 at miles.cs.brown.edu> wsd at cs.brown.edu (Wm. Scott `Spot' Draves) writes:
>In article <266577FA.6D99 at tct.uucp> chip at tct.uucp (Chip Salzenberg) writes:
>   According to jtc at van-bc.UUCP (J.T. Conklin):
>
>  [stuff deleted]
>
>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".
>

May I be among the first to say HORSEPUCKY!

There seems to be a mindset among many CS majors that
"memory is cheap and hardware is fast, so why worry about efficiency?"

This kind of thinking is the result of looking only at chip prices and
the latest hot-rod announcements.  In truth, only a SMALL subset of the
(potential) customers for any given piece of software are running the
'latest and greatest' with beaucoup RAM.  The rest of us are running on
whatever we've got now and often this is older equipment or 'bare-bones'
versions of the hotter stuff because that was all we could afford.

There is a simple financial reality that is often overlooked:

	1) Regardless of the **theoretical prices**, if I don't HAVE 'it'
	   I have to go buy it.
	2) The money I have to go buy 'it' with could also go towards
	   the purchase of other things.
	3) Therefore, I have to demonstrate (to myself, my spouse,
	   my manager, the bean-counters, etc) that buying 'it' has
	   sufficient return on investment to justify THAT purchase
	   instead of some other.
	4) It is very hard to justify continual upgrades of equipment
	   just to get the 'latest and greatest' features, unless these
	   features translate DIRECTLY into some real benefit.
	5) If the latest and greatest is not directly upwards compatible
	   with my current configuration, there is an ADDITONAL hidden cost
	   associated with converting/replacing my current installed base
	   of software and hardware.
	6) Even 'cheap' upgrades get expensive if you have to buy a lot
	   of copies.  (This site has over 250 PC's, think the Controller
	   wants to spend $500 each to upgrade the memory just to get some
	   fancier display?)
	7) Customers DON'T CARE how clear/modular/elegant your code is
	   unless the clarity/elegance/whatever has some demonstratable
	   benefit to THEM!

Maybe all CS majors should be forced to take a few economics courses along
with the rest of their curriculum!

FAST, SMALL, CHEAP   <--- Pick any 2, you can't have all 3.
-- 
Bill Meahan  WA8TZG		uunet!mailrus!umich!pmsmam!wwm
I speak only for myself - even my daughter's cat won't let me speak for her!