Mr. MacNeil's latest defense of his 5% rule is a farrago of nonsense salted
with radical internal contradictions.
He begins with the wholly appropriate, albeit banal, observation that
algorithms are crucial; but he conjoins it with the absurd notion that
programming-language choices are of little consequence.
In fact COBOL is compile-time bound, move-orient[at]ed, and synchronous.
Pointers exist, just, in it; but there is no tradition of using them. In the
upshot list- and pointer-oriented, execution-time bound, and asynchronous
algorithms are difficult---for most programmers impossible---to implement in
COBOL. There is indeed a view---It is not intellectually respectable, but it
is widespread---that business programmers have no business using such
hifalutin' schemes.
My other problem with Mr. MacNeil's views is that they are provincial. It
would appear that he has spent the bulk of his career dealing with business
problems, narrowly defined to encompass only bean-counting applications. These
preoccupations are not in themselves objectionable, but z/Architecture machines
are used for other things too.
I had occasion to look recently at a routine I wrote long ago, in a mixture of
PL/I and assembly language, to deal with the trim [minimization] problem for
rolls of newsprint. Like most such integer linear-programming routines it does
little i/o. It spends almost all of its time doing matrix algebra, and 73% of
its execution time is spent in user-written code.
It would of course be possible to counter this example with another, a
classical i/o-bound MFU say, in which shrinking the execution time of user code
to zero would have no measurable impact on residence time.
That indeed is my point:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
John Gilmore Ashland, MA 01721-1817 USA
_________________________________________________________________
The New Busy think 9 to 5 is a cute idea. Combine multiple calendars with
Hotmail.
http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?tile=multicalendar&ocid=PID28326::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WM_HMP:042010_5
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