== Quote from Walter Bright (newshou...@digitalmars.com)'s article > Steven Schveighoffer wrote: > >> Just goes to show how useful a profiler is. > > > > Yes, I'm glad you pushed me to do it. Looking forward to the fix. > The two secrets to writing fast code are: > 1. using a profiler > 2. looking at the assembler output of the compiler > In my experience, programmers will go to astonishing lengths to avoid doing > those two, and will correspondingly expend hundreds of hours "optimizing" and > getting perplexing results.
There are also those who are not programmers, and don't know what they are doing in the first place. A couple years back i was hired as part of a 'rural our-sourcing' experiment where they took people in the local area who had _some_ technical potential. They would then be hired out cheaper than experienced programmers. We went through a 14 week course for Java boot camp. Out of 24 I was the only one who knew anything about programming. Through the course they weren't told anything about profiling, looking at assembly language, or using a debugger. They were taught the absolute minimum. I watched several when the program wouldn't compile or work right they would randomly make changes trying to get the code to work. Be afraid. Be very afraid.