[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: Will Father Moore save us from our sins? - was Re: [xml-de

• To: XML Developers List <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: Will Father Moore save us from our sins? - was Re: Eclipse: the new Emacs? (and the XML story)
• From: David Megginson <dmeggin@a...>
• Date: Mon, 05 Apr 2004 14:10:56 -0400
• In-reply-to: <15725CF6AFE2F34DB8A5B4770B7334EE03F9F593@h...>
• References: <15725CF6AFE2F34DB8A5B4770B7334EE03F9F593@h...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040401 Debian/1.6-4

Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:

> Even when resources are cheap, discipline is worthy.  This is 
> when it is most worthy, not with regard to short term 
> economics, but long term health that is harder to come by as 
> any system ages and increases its interdependencies.  

I wouldn't go that far: when the optimization won't bring significant,
measurable benefits, I prefer clear code over optimized code: code that is
slightly slower or more memory-intensive but a lot more transparent and easy
to maintain will win over the long term.

The most important places to optimize are code inside a tight loop (say, the
main loop of an interactive game) and code used for common data types (say,
element, attribute and text nodes in a DOM).  Optimizing code that will be
called or instantiated thousands or millions of times is a good, easy hit;
optimizing code that will be called or instantiated once or a dozen times is
counterproductive.


All the best,


David

• References:
  • RE: Will Father Moore save us from our sins? - was Re: Eclipse: the new Emacs? (and the XML story)
    • From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>

• Prev by Date: RE: Competing Specifications - A Good or Bad Thing?
• Next by Date: RE: Will Father Moore save us from our sins? - was Re: Eclipse: the new Emacs? (and the XML story)
• Previous by thread: RE: Will Father Moore save us from our sins? - was Re: Eclipse: the new Emacs? (and the XML story)
• Next by thread: RE: Will Father Moore save us from our sins? - was Re: Eclipse: the new Emacs? (and the XML story)
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread