Re: [comphist] Lost arts from the 8 bit days.

[Eli <el...@pf...>]

On Wednesday 02 October 2002 03:26 pm, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
[snip]
> I am *glad* this kind of programming is dying out.  And I say that as
> somebody who did a lot of it back when it was necessary.  I'll say
> this once:
>
> 	MAINTAINABILITY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN EFFICIENCY
>
> No, that wasn't the case fifteen years ago, or even ten.  Machines were
> too constrained.  But today, if I were managing a project and caught
> anybody doing tricks like you describe, I'd chew him out but good.  There
> is such a thing as being too clever in the wrong direction, and this is it.

No argument here... but... I think of it differently.

When I was playing with GWBASIC, I was writing some fun little games.  The 
graphics weren't half bad for a highschool freshman, and they were fun to 
make and play.... and I could play them as I made them.
I outgrew what GWBASIC could do, and migrated to C.
I never wrote any games in C.  Graphics were too much of a hassle, and I had 
begun to try adding a 'design' phase to my development process.  (With no 
formal programming education, I'll leave the definition of 'design' to your 
imagination ;). )  Programming had become hard.  Bit twiddling was new 
territory, and I enjoyed it, but making something fun was just too much work.

On a graphing calculator, you had to be clever, but it was fun, because you 
were stretching a _calculator_ to play tic-tac-toe against you (in Casio's 
400 bytes), or making a chess board and using almost all its memory (TI's 
90k).

Years passed; I discovered operating systems, got a job doing Linux kernel 
work.  Lots of fun and challenge.

But I am one of those fellows that works very hard at being lazy.  I had, in 
my quest for automation, out-grown shell scripting.  Yeah, I could do 
anything in a shell, but good data structures make life a lot easier, and 
doing any 'real' processing on data was becoming rube-goldbergesque.

Quickly getting a program that was "useful" (for an ever-increasing 
definition of "useful") was getting too painful.

So I started looking for a new language to learn.  I knew C/C++, and C++ 
was^Wcould be an improvement, but it was still 'C' to me.  I'd seen Java, and 
it felt like C+=2 which wasn't what I wanted either.  Perl just looked like 
$#!^.  I've read a lot about the 'power of Lisp', but I've used 
((L),(I),(),(S),(P))... thanks, but no thanks.

Then I found Python.  The language looked much more high-level, and I could 
do things with it that I had emulated in C++ (passing a pointer to a member 
function of a specific object for instance).  And it had ready access to GUI 
toolkits.
I've found that programming is fun again, and I'm finally toying with a game 
idea to implement in Python.  (Well, now that I've found PyQt and dumped 
tkinter... Documentation!!!!)

That gets me utilities that are _useful_ very _quickly_.  They may be 
sluggish, but on a decent modern PC, they're fast enough, and can automate 
things with a click of the mouse that would take me much longer than if I 
were doing it myself.

So what happens when I run into something that is just too slow?
Profile to find the hot spots, improve those algorithms if I can, but if I 
really just need a piece of code to execute faster, I can buy a faster PC or 
implement just that algorithm in C/C++, and call it from Python.  (Or so I've 
read; I haven't needed to go that far... it's usually algorithmic in nature.)

In other words, I can create something that does 0.1% of what I need, and use 
it, freeing up time to develop the next 0.1% smoothly.  It may not handle 
10GB inputs, but I don't have those yet, and when I do, I know I can easily 
make the needed changes _then_.

Useful now, better later.

Writing 'tight', 'clever' code takes too long.  I want to be _using_ this 
program already!  (If laziness is a virtue, is impatience? ;) )

(Note that this doesn't necessarily apply in all areas... kernel work for 
example.  If it has to be reliable, or deal with hostility, the rules change.)

Now where'd I leave my asbestos underwear? ;)

Eli