> Socially I think we allow computers to hand-cuff us.
Socially? As in people don't get out enought and meet in meat-space? Or our interactions, even on-line? > Well, maybe if the optimization is as swell as it's said > > to be. I can't help but feel that even as smart as > > computers are, there are areas that a human could see a > > "pattern" before the computer could. Or whatever. > > Is this a response to my comment about why I'm not bothered by the > fact that the ColdFusion server generates java code? (another good > example of which is that the server used to generate C++ code (at > least I thought I remembered somebody saying such), and my knowledge > of C++ wasn't helpful when I worked with ColdFusion then either) More along the lines of "over helpful" generation. The old mac OS always kind of bugged me. It was SO arcane to do underlying stuff, ya know? I guess that was cool too. But you ever feel so abstracted that you are no longer in control? I guess that's bad design or interface or something more than abstraction... The computer still doesn't know the goal (yet), so it has to consider all options, picking what it thinks you want. Your comment about hoping the macromedia engeneers thought about this stuff... some dude some where put some logic in there, there is no law of nature stating that it doesn't matter once your at a higher level. Man, that made sense. Maybe you're right, and it's a moot point, but I think understanding something to it's core is worthy. Actually considering the difference of running "the same code" on a 64 bit or a 32 bit. It's nice to know it should "just work", but I really like that intuitive guess type stuff that happens when you start understanding the nature of something. "How did you know to look there to fix that?" "I dunno, it just made sense." Sometimes stuff doesn't work, even tho we're told at the high level it should. Then what. :-P Ya gotta dig in. If you dig that kind of stuff. I guess you could also just say, "hey person who's thing my thing doesn't work with, why aren't you "standard"?". Or wait for the person who's job it is to do that part figures it out. > > Guess the argument about optimization has some validity, > > yet I can't help see history repeat itself. Every few > > years there's this idea that it doesn't matter, we're > > getting bigger, faster processors, more RAM, etc.. Yet > > the real idea is to conserve energy. Sorta. I guess make > > less go further. That's never going to change, no > > matter how much power there is. It's the nature of > > power - corruption and responsibility aside. > > No not entirely. The issue is that we're still in transition. The > hardware progress is not as fast as many of us would like and > sometimes we jump the gun with regard to wanting to be able to have > the Star Trek computer that we just tell what to do and it does it. So > if I build an application today and I fail to optimize it , then my > application is going to be slow in comparison to another application > which accomplishes the same task. (Incidentally I spend quite a bit of > my programming time thinking about the optimization of my software -- > I may not always get it right, but I do have a reasonable handle on > the concepts.) > > Skip forward 20 years. I guess our ideas of optimization are different. When I think of optimization, it's not necessarily "speed". There are so many areas to optimize, many of which have nothing to do with processors or memory. And much optimization is usefull later on. I would think. At least it seems kind of evolving, or whatever. All that being said of course, anyone can screw up a good thing and > it's not very difficult to accomplish. There are lots of times that Ha!! That kills me. Listen to this: I had the bright idea to instead of having tables with different data- types, I'd have tables all of one data-type, and use a key and another table to keep track of what was where or whatever. Long story short, it's death by a thousand queries. I had to make some cache tables in the end, just to keep it all together. Bleh. I'd had some SQL generating stuff already tho so the cache wasn't too hard to wrangle. And now everything is a lot faster, so long as I can get my cache-keeper-up-to-dater working optimally. > Sorta saying it's all data, but some data is much > > easier to parse than other data is. By "much" I > > mean astronomically. > > Oh. Okay... Yes, admittedly. :) > Hence much of the reason behind XML. Indeed. I thought that was all the reason. ;-) An object on disk, an object in mem... um. let me try to think of how to express what I'm thinking. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Message: http://www.houseoffusion.com/lists.cfm/link=i:4:237494 Archives: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/threads.cfm/4 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/lists.cfm/link=s:4 Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.4 Donations & Support: http://www.houseoffusion.com/tiny.cfm/54
