[erlang-questions] At what point am I "playing compiler"

[Toby Thain]

On 18-May-09, at 7:03 PM, John Haugeland wrote:

>> Knuth also wrote (though I can't find the reference) that it was not
>> worth optimising
>> something that got called less that 10^9 times (I think that's right)
>> - he wrote that something like 20 years ago, so today the advice must
>> be 10^12 times :-)
>
> This isn't, of course, meant to be taken literally, ...
>
> This is a bit like quoting e=mc^2 : there are actually a bunch of
> things removed from that in order to make it brief and pithy enough to
> use as a rule of thumb. ...

Ah, but the *more common* behaviour is to optimise unnecessarily, not  
to reject optimisation where it's merited (how would that fly for  
very long?)

If it's needed, it's needed. If it's not, it's not. That is a rule of  
thumb that is essentially Knuth's rephrased. Your "counterexample"  
was obviously a case that was "needed" because it's built into your  
requirements: "I would prefer this to take days, rather than months".

Or, you never realised it could be made orders of magnitude faster  
until you fixed a design flaw. (Optimisation by accident.)

>
> We're scientists.  We don't pick numbers like 10^9 out of the air.
> Knuth, hallowed be his name, was merely giving the range as an
> observation to prevent people from sweating single cycles out of their
> bash scripts.  Constructing valid counterexamples is trivial for a
> college freshman.
>
> Skepticism in all things is the basis of deep understanding.


...and that includes skepticism about the reflex and attendant  
"rationalisations" for micro-optimising early. (Which is just wasting  
a different and more valuable resource.)

--Toby

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