Path: csiph.com!usenet.pasdenom.info!news.albasani.net!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Eric Sosman Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer Subject: Re: error discription and solution Date: Mon, 03 Mar 2014 17:04:41 -0500 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 63 Message-ID: References: <7ad4a15c-7e35-4d08-a61f-4d673f5d4ef0@googlegroups.com> <081fg9thirl4u17mdbeq8q3oocgtbakr7t@4ax.com> <97SdnYwVB7SC1onOnZ2dnUVZ8gednZ2d@bt.com> <140f3bv3kst7.7zenor3r2v2k.dlg@40tude.net> <5ujw21gfmtzd$.1jtrdvdlsnf4y.dlg@40tude.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2014 22:04:42 +0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: mx05.eternal-september.org; posting-host="bd4e1cba8d8592bec5d5ed9e4537fbfd"; logging-data="1280"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX18MYXaBM7e2rh6PPSH9hNCe" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.3.0 In-Reply-To: <5ujw21gfmtzd$.1jtrdvdlsnf4y.dlg@40tude.net> Cancel-Lock: sha1:HJ2Ev2VkOwBR6iLjhESMpgphjOo= Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.java.programmer:27679 On 3/3/2014 11:39 AM, Joerg Meier wrote: > On Mon, 03 Mar 2014 10:17:07 -0600, Leif Roar Moldskred wrote: > >> Joerg Meier wrote: >>> That is an unfair and disgenuine argument. Nobody is suggesting people >>> don't LEARN how things work. You asked how to get something to work, not >>> how to learn about how the Java build process works. Going by your answer, >>> I would suggest you abandon Java completely, and instead focus on learning >>> Assembler, which of course you should only ever write using Notepad. >> Obligatory link to the Story of Mel: > >> http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html > > Every few years, someone links this, and every time, I read it again to my > great delight. As my life progresses, it's interesting for me to note how > my view of Mel changed over the years - from uncompromising and unreflected > hero worship when I was still young and a cowboy, to "I hope I never have > to fix code like that" when I started working on multi-person projects for > the first time, to "I hope I never have a coworker like that", ending with > "I hope I never have an employee like that". > > Mel is, at once, the best and the worst aspects of a clever programmer. Mel wrought his wonders when the economics of computing were quite the opposite of those that prevail today. CPU's were slow, so CPU cycles were in short supply and therefore expensive. Memories were small, and also expensive (I toured a factory once and saw core memory being assembled by hand, one ferrite doughnut at a time). Programmers, on the other hand were cheap and plentiful, "plentiful" in the sense that a small number of programmers could produce enough code to keep the small, slow machines running at full capacity; more programmers would only have increased the backlogs. Today it's the other way around. CPU cycles are so plentiful and cheap that we routinely waste them on things like screen "savers." Memories are so big that we cheerfully spend sixteen bytes or more on a `Double' in preference to an eight-byte `double'. And as the demand for programmers' output has grown, the programmers themselves have become expensive. The foot is in the other shoe: Instead of spending programmer time lavishly to rewrite a program for a new machine, we strain every nerve to amortize development effort over multiple hardware generations. Damn the inefficiencies, full speed ahead! Mel wrote clever code because that's the only code that would work: The program had to fit in the tiny memory, and it had to finish before the sponsor's CPU funds ran out. Today, you and I use words like "asymptotically" and studiously avoid being clever. Guess what? The fact that we *are* right doesn't mean Mel *was* wrong; the fact that he *was* right doesn't mean we *are* wrong. We work in radically different circumstances; it's not too much of a stretch to say we work in radically different industries. The interesting question, I think, is What Happens Tomorrow? Will quantum computers or thought-directed computing or positronic brains change things as fundamentally as they have changed since Mel? Will the Best Practices we promote today be dismissed as just so much primitive bunkum? Naturally, I don't know -- but I wouldn't bet against it ... -- Eric Sosman esosman@comcast-dot-net.invalid