Bloat costs

[Peter da Silva]

In article <23473 at uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> bp at beach.cis.ufl.edu (Brian Pane) writes:
> If such a mindset exists, it is not because of the abundance of powerful
> hardware.  It is because CS majors are taught to build robust, maintainable,
> and therefore seemingly elegant programs rather than compact and clever
> programs.  If we get used to writing ruthlessly brilliant programs,
> we'll only add to the "software crisis" when we graduate.

Lots of nice buzzwords there, fella. Trouble is, it doesn't mean anything.
First of all, I haven't noticed that much, if any, difference in the quality
of net contributions from academia and industry. Quantity, yes... industry
can't afford the time to write the latest and greatest freeware. Second,
nobody's advocating gratuitous microefficiency here, just a consideration
of space-time tradeoffs in choosing algorithms. Like not loading a whole
file when you can get away with reading a line at a time. Or if you *do*,
check how much there is to read before you read it instead of just allocating
a big array and doubling in size when it fills up. Using a simplistic
algorithm makes as much sense as using bubble-sort on a megabyte array.

> Finally, note that large and "inefficient" programs advance the state
> of the art in software more often than small and clever programs.
> Consider X Windows.

Yes, lets.

> It is a huge system designed for flexibility
> rather than efficiency, and it requires significant hardware power,
> but it has revolutionized the way we use computers.

Actually, it was the Xerox Star and the Apple Macintosh that did that.
Machines with a fraction of the resources of the typical X workstation.
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