[erlang-questions] Anonymous functions and performance

[Richard O'Keefe]

On 2/11/2011, at 11:08 PM, Joe Armstrong wrote:
> When the great old ones said years ago "Premature optimization
> is the root of all evil" - they were using machines that by todays
> standards were
> incredibly slow. Even then they viewed premature optimization as evil.


Mind you, premature pessimisation isn't a good idea.
I'm in the middle of a, um, discussion about the marking of two
student projects.  Both of them involved comparing the performance
of some algorithms.  Both of them had code that was a factor of
4 to 6 *thousand* times slower than straightforward C.  I think
that this makes their results meaningless, or at any rate useless,
and that a project with such results deserves a low mark.  On the
other side it is argued that these are well presented projects...

Straightforward code using straightforward data structures is the aim.