On 9 October 2013 03:35, Guido van Rossum <gu...@python.org> wrote: > On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 8:33 AM, R. David Murray <rdmur...@bitdance.com>wrote: > >> PS: I have always thought it sad that the ready availability of memory, >> CPU speed, and disk space tends to result in lazy programs. I understand >> there is an effort/value tradeoff, and I make those tradeoffs myself >> all the time...but it still makes me sad. Then, again, in my early >> programming days I spent a fair amount of time writing and using Forth, >> and that probably colors my worldview. :) >> > > I never used or cared for Forth, but I have the same worldview. I remember > getting it from David Rosenthal, an early Sun reviewer. He stated that > engineers should be given the smallest desktop computer available, not the > largest, so they would feel their users' pain and optimize appropriately. > Sadly software vendors who are also hardware vendors have incentives going > in the opposite direction -- they want users to feel the pain so they'll > buy a new device. >
I look at it a different way. Developers should be given powerful machines to speed up the development cycle (especially important when prototyping and in the code/run unit test cycle), but everything should be tested on the smallest machine available. It's also a good idea for each developer to have a resource-constrained machine for developer testing/profiling/etc. Virtual machines work quite well for this - you can modify the resource constraints (CPU, memory, etc) to simulate different scenarios. I find that this tends to better promote the methodology of "make it right, then make it fast (small, etc)", which I subscribe to. Optimising too early leads to all your code being complicated, rather than just the bits that need it. Tim Delaney
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