From: Phillip Gawlowski Date: 2011-04-04T18:52:35+09:00 Subject: Re: Lambda Shambda On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 11:23 AM, Everett L Williams II wrote: > > *And, of course, since we were talking about making a practical decision > about which tool to use, performance cannot possibly matter. There is also > this overriding compulsion amongst coders to produce the most abbreviated > code possible, assuming that such demonstrates their special skills and that > such code is the most desirable. Any study of algorithmic efficiency will > show clearly that the shortest code is almost never the fastest code, > especially in unoptimized code.* Strawman, again. We were not talking about performance. 'sides, premature optimization is the root of all evil. Once there's benchmarks and solid data on load and usage, we can talk about optimizing for performance. Enjoy making an Excel spreadsheet multi-threaded, though. Excel 2007 isn't cheap (which introduced multi-threading for spreadsheets). > *If this were an extraordinary claim, your comment would hold true, but only > exceptional arrogance would cause any other claim to be made. "Acceptable" > means satisfactory to the person doing the programming, who is usually some > grunt just trying to get his job done, rather than someone who is a > proponent of any particular thing. I'll try not talk about "fanboys" here.* It's called burden of proof. You make a claim, you go prove it. Further: given your definition of acceptable, any code at all, qualifies as "acceptable", no matter its performance (you brought it up), maintainability (the comptroller will bring *that* up), or buggyness (So what if the application crashes and burns if a variable isn't formatted as expected?). > *When I am responsible for something, unless some feature in the current > version is absolutely necessary, I tend to drop back one or two versions to > cover most of my market, not to mention to avoid the hazards of being on the > bleeding edge.* How many of all machines running Windows run Excel as well, and in which versions? What you tend to do is irrelevant, I want to know if a tool based off of Excel has a viable market. > *Having made the progression from Assembler to COBOL and FORTRAN and on to > dozens of other languages, I would have agreed with you until I started > seeing people write all sorts of stuff in Excel. Again, I would never have > recommended those uses, but they seemed to do the job.* Well, then you can provide a non-trivial example of an Excel spreadsheet that doesn't use VBA, right? > On the other hand, matrices are not the only method > for working such problems. In EE, it's the fastest, least error-prone method to analyze networks, since you can use Kirchhoff's circuit laws. > From what I know of it, I wouldn't use Excel for > huge classes of problems, but some people seem to be able to twist it to do > things that I would never have guessed. "To the man with a hammer, > everything looks like a nail."...even when a screw or glue might do a better > job. The point is that he knows how to use the hammer and can get prodigious > amounts of work done with it, so he has to think very carefully when someone > tells him he has to learn this new and completely different tool while the > work gets behind. And that is the rub: People don't know better. The reasons are multiple, but that's what it comes down. If all I know is how to drive a car with automatic transmission, I won't be able to get the best out of a car with manual transmission. > About 50% of the real newbies to programming who come on this site with a > complex project that requires unstable parts of the Ruby pantheon, should be > told to use another tool, one that is simpler, more mature, and that does a > better job of handholding, but people who spend most of their time on Ruby > tend to think with their hammer, so to speak, or maybe, they don't really > know anything else. Take a look at the archives of ruby-talk, then. You'll be surprised. -- Phillip Gawlowski Though the folk I have met, (Ah, how soon!) they forget When I've moved on to some other place, There may be one or two, When I've played and passed through, Who'll remember my song or my face.