On Tue, May 3, 2016 at 6:18 PM, Nick Hilliard <nick@foobar.org> wrote:
William Herrin wrote:
And it is poor code quality. Even slicing and dicing the ram in odd ways, there's just no excuse for an order-of-magnitude increase in ram required to run the same algorithms on the same data.
If RAM were expensive, your argument would make sense, but RAM is not expensive.
Hi Nick, You missed the point. Sloppy memory management is a "canary in a coal mine." It's a user-visible symptom that reflects poor code quality underneath. Programmers who don't care how much ram they're consuming are the same fools who catch and then ignore exceptions, don't bother evaluating the big-oh running time of their algorithms (often have no idea what that is) and engage in a variety of other bad practices that you as the customer suffer for but never directly see. It's not the cost of the ram, it's the attitude that ram is cheap so I won't care. It's a bad attitude, a dangerous attitude when found in a computer programmer. One which consistently leads to failure. If you challenge poor code quality when you spot it, your vendor might correct course. If you let it slide then by the time the code base is damaged enough for the pointy-hairs to understand there's a problem on their own, your only real choice will be to switch to a different product or vendor.
Can we move on now?
Sure, why not. I've proselytized enough for one day. Regards, Bill Herrin -- William Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us Owner, Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>