[erlang-questions] Anonymous functions and performance

[Toby Thain]

On 03/11/11 9:35 PM, Richard O'Keefe wrote:
>
> 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...

C enjoys the widespread, flattering fallacy that what is written in it 
will be "fast", while the costs of low expressivity and abstraction (not 
to mention the tedium and make-work) are happily ignored...

>
> Straightforward code using straightforward data structures is the aim.

Give this man a cigar.

--Toby

>
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