> > On Sep 7, 2006, at 4:13 AM, Sander van Dijk wrote: > > >Optimization is far overrated,
I remember Andrew S. Tanenbaum describing a student that spent several months optimizing the filesystem initialization (or formatting) program for the Minix file system in 1980s. He got it to run from one minute to a few seconds on a given disk. Tanenbaum said (paraphrasing) that the whole work was pretty useless, as the disk is usually initialized once per operating system install, and it is irrelevant if it takes a minute or a second at the installation phase. This incident may be in his book Modern Operating Systems, although I'm not sure if I read it from there or somewhere else. I'd like to point out that although optimization is overrated, it is wise to create systems that are optimal or semi-optimal by design. Most often those solutions are also the shortest and most elegant ones. I wouldn't call that optimizing, because the verb "to optimize" tends to have a negative flavor in some sense, but it's a similar process. -- Ville Koskinen
