> One symptom which indicates that programmers are amateurs is that they > prematurely optimize.
That's certainly true in compiler design, but.... > ... "More HP!" Oh - hp. I thought you were talking about printers. :-) > So real engineers laugh at the "10 more horsepower" crowd. Yes, but, one thing that drives the high performance computing market is just that. Spending what looks like a lot of time on compiler and library work to get 5% more results out of a system is likely much less effort than is required by the chip and system designers to get 5% more out of a design. > (Bridges give us some EXCELLENT examples of > what happens when an engineer goes a little bit amateur. You've probably > seen a video of the Tacoma Narrows bridge coming apart.) In that particular case, it was more along the line of inadequate wind tunnel and simulation time. (The slide rules of the day were slow and inaccurate.) When an entire profession learns a lot from a particular bridge, blaming it on amateurs is a bit unfair. And they learned a lot before the winds got to strong. Besides - a lot of current bridges can be taken down surprisingly easily. Marching bands break sync crossing bridges, the Golden Gate bridge has been closed due to winds and strengthed in response. It was visibly deflected by the pedestrian load during its 50th anniversary celebration when the bridge was closed to vehicles and open to pedestrians. http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/11/MNGRIPPB271.DTL http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/pictopia2?o=7&f=/templates/types/store/pages/buyphotos/dtl/goldengate.DTL -Ric _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
