Bloat costs

[Greg Franks]

In article <23473 at uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> we find:
...
>>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
>
>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.

David Parnas would beg to differ.  He is not certain which is worse,
an Engineer who has been writing Fortran for the last 20 years, or a
present day CS major.  The former do not know ``modern'' programming
practices, hence they produce goto-full programs that do one thing
rather well.  The latter produce ``elegant'' programs that not only do
what the customer wanted (maybe), but twenty billion other things as
well.  After all does `ls' really need 18 different options?
Unfortunately, computer programming still seems to live in the CISC
era.

Prof. Parnas recently wrote an article in IEEE Computer on this very
subject.  I recommend reading it.

From:  "just call me Tex (as in massacre) - my productivity is
measured in negative lines"  :-) :-) :-)
-- 
Greg Franks, (613) 788-5726              |"The reason that God was able to
Systems Engineering, Carleton University,|create the world in seven days is
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada  K1S 5B6.        |that he didn't have to worry about
greg at sce.carleton.ca uunet!mitel!sce!greg|the installed base" -- Enzo Torresi