I find the point on developing on a slower computer very interesting, and here's my story.
I've been using an EeePC for everything for the past 2.5 years and until now, I could cope. I'm getting a new laptop this week because I direly need it at the faculty (some robotics/image processing/computer vision — no way to run these on an EeePC realtime). However, I could notice an interesting trend between my colleagues' programs and mine. For example, solving the 15-game with heuristics took ~0.01 secs on the Eee, and comparing to others' programs theirs took several seconds and found worse solutions (not all of them of course, but most). When doing some local search optimisation, the difference was seconds-to-HOURS. I guess someone was really sloppy, but still. This has also been one of the reasons I became interested in languages like C and D. Believe it or not, in our university, you don't ever get to see C officially if you don't learn it yourself. I consider this pathetic. The official and only taught language is Java. Which I grant them is at least cross-platform, but I believe that every university-educated programmer must know C. I am convinced that my university produces bad programmers and as such don't find it surprising that new written programs are terribly slow, if they even work at all. Matej
