
Grace Hopper to Programmers: Mind Your Nanoseconds - jnazario
http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/3/1/grace-hopper-to-programmers-mind-your-nanoseconds.html
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maligree
Rant inspired by seeing her for the 5th time this week:

It's like every time I hear about Grace Hopper, it's got to do with a piece of
wire. Or tube. And any comments on it are usually strangely excited, almost
awestruck. What's up, people? She did some other stuff too. Like, no big deal
back then, writing a god damn compiler.

It's like people treat her like a dancing bear. Look, woman! Look, uniform!
Look, she said "nano"! Take a step back and a deep breath. Chill out.

"Bike shed" comes to mind, in a weird way.

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jbrooksuk
Darn Hipsters.

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DanWaterworth
From SICP:

> Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for
> machines to execute.

When programmers care about lack of efficiency before it's a problem, they're
doing it wrong.

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meaty
until you get to the end game and you realise you have a lemon on your hands
which is going to require a rewrite because it's so slow when you throw 10,000
users at it...

"Be mindful" is probably better advice. Tradeoffs are easier to make earlier
on and everything is a compromise after all.

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DanWaterworth
What I said was:

> When programmers care about lack of efficiency before it's a problem,
> they're doing it wrong.

That doesn't mean that you shouldn't identify problems as quickly as possible,
just don't try to improve performance when you haven't got a problem in front
of you.

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stephengillie
That also affects sensor resolution, if your processor is counting the clock
cycles while photons are flying through the air. Like radar.

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silentific
The article is ok, the video is a must watch. She's witty.

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serf
third or fourth time this has been posted within the past 12 months.

I sure hope someone posts the Letterman interview with her next, so I can see
that to the nth as well.

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jkat
Your account is only 47 days old?

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skrebbel
HN cannot be read without an account?

