--- Jeremy Hill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Sorry but you've hit on one of my pet peeves ;p
> Just for fun (took 10 minutes to write this, this e-mail took longer to
> write), here's a fun (albeit slightly inefficent) C++ way to do helps
> using the STL vector class and the STL sort method.
[snip]
Please don't make arbitrary statements like "slightly inefficient" etc. I
realize that you go on to give more specifics, but many budding mud developers
won't understand what you said, and will latch on to your judgment and proceed
to try and come up with their own method in order to better optimize whatever
it is they are doing.
I can't count the number of people who've told me that they are going to
program their mud in C rather than C++ or even a high level scripting language
like Perl or Python. They come to this descsion because they've been told that
C is "faster" than these other higher level languages. They lack the experience
to know that the performance diferences (particularly in a mud) will be almost
negligable.
They also don't understand that in many cases (note I did not say all)
development and maintenance efficiency is much more desirable than runtime
efficiency. If there is a simple built in function or library that will work,
better to use it and spend your time developing new custom features for your
program than to spend a lot of extra time and effort to make your own version
of the existing code.
Many mud programmers have little or no formal programming knowlege or training.
Most simply take other ppls code and tweak it, etc. They would (I'm sure) have
a much easier time developing in a higher level language, and would probably
encounter a lot less trivial mistakes (memory management, etc) if they were to
use something that was easier to understand and maintain.
Ok, I'm off the soap box now.. Thanks for your time.
~Kender
P.S. Premature optimization is the root of all evil
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