

The infinitely profitable program - mhansen
http://www.peetm.com/blog/?p=55

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sundarurfriend
I understand this is meant to be humour, but it brings up a very important
problem - the mapping between the profit from software and the processes that
create it, and in some sense, measuring programmer productivity.

Here, though the program size was 0, the idea was what the cost was for - to
come up with this idea, one has to have deep knowledge about the machine and
about the way programs are executed on it in particular. One should also spend
some brain power (and have the ability to do so) on how to use that to our
advantage.

Now, imagine a program of say 100 bytes, whose idea was conceived by one
programmer but the implementation written by another. Then, how would you
divide the profit from the software among them (assuming you do that)? It
perhaps depends on how detailed the idea was, how much thought had to be put
in to implement it, how 'brilliant' or 'out-of-the-box' the idea and many
other factors, almost all of which are qualitative.

In short, determining salaries and increments for programmers seems a very
hard problem.

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zb
A nice reminder that the artifact is not the product.

~~~
notauser


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NathanKP
I love to hear stories about programming on those early computers.

Of course, similar functionality is built into most, if not all, modern
operating systems. On Mac OS X it is very efficient with memory and maintains
the memory of closed programs such that if you hit ⌘ + Q to terminate the
process and then you relaunch the program it usually starts up almost
instantly.

~~~
mhansen
I don't think it maintains all the memory of closed programs - the data/stack
areas of memory will differ hugely between when a program is closed and when a
program is launched. If you did save all these areas of memory, the program's
state would be exactly the same between opening/closing.

However, the disk blocks containing the executable program file are likely to
be cached in memory after you open a program. Memory is orders of magnitudes
faster than the hard disk, so this would explain the speedup

