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Drop millions of allocations by using a linked list

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Re: Drop millions of allocations by using a linked list

#41

Post by lmm »

twsted wrote: post #23
aidos wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Annnndddd.... what reaction do you expect? "Oh, please come and do web development so we can bask in the glow of your self-righteousness and infinite knowledge of computers." /snark (apologies for being offensive, but good lord, what a silly statement - unless I missed the joke) I stand before you as a counterpoint to your foolish generalisation, and guess what, I know plenty of other people that don't fit your stere…

The statement was a little strong, but in my experience it contains some truth. People who has never used a lower-level programming language can't often recognize these performance issues.

I've often found the opposite; people who use C get excited about using >> rather than / because it saved a few cycles on very old compilers, but fail to notice where they could've made it a million times faster by using a hash table rather than a linked list.

Re: Drop millions of allocations by using a linked list

#42

Post by grey-area »

perdunov wrote: post #36
grey-area wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost everyone does do lamest mistakes at some point, e.g.: goto:fail - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7281378 shellshock - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8365110 I'm sure whoever wrote this would feel a little chagrin when coming back to their code and seeing how inefficient it was (though it got the job done when the lists were small), and they probably would admit their shortcomings, why wouldn't they…

Mistakes come for different reasons: the human brain's limitations; carelessness; bad methodologies; ignorance. I was talking about the last one here. "PS Rubygems isn't a web framework, it's a package management tool, so the straw man you're hacking away at is the wrong one." My statement about web frameworks was not about RubyGems, it was about web frameworks, and it was an example of the state of affairs in web de…

You think the original authors (Chad Fowler, Rich Kilmer, Jim Weirich) were ignorant of linked lists? What hubris.

The story is about rubygems, not web dev.

Re: Drop millions of allocations by using a linked list

#43

Post by pointernil »

twsted wrote: post #23
aidos wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Annnndddd.... what reaction do you expect? "Oh, please come and do web development so we can bask in the glow of your self-righteousness and infinite knowledge of computers." /snark (apologies for being offensive, but good lord, what a silly statement - unless I missed the joke) I stand before you as a counterpoint to your foolish generalisation, and guess what, I know plenty of other people that don't fit your stere…

The statement was a little strong, but in my experience it contains some truth. People who has never used a lower-level programming language can't often recognize these performance issues.

Unless a senior developer / a "wise" developer reviews the artifact created and allows him/herself to state: "This is not effective code. Refactor it by x y z".

The problem is, I think, this is NOT happening or at least to seldom because it "does not pay off", because "the aws boxes are sooo cheap!"

I'd say: the aws boxes are way too cheap and effectively misused. What should have been a way to scale up apps with reasonable effort turned into an energy and resources burning landfill. Granted, at least it is a shared landfill which really helps with from the resources/energy point of view.

(Juniors) Coders should be able to power the machines by driving a bicycle ergometer ... as a way to make the homo-sapience grasp the effects of their "mental work" ;)

Re: Drop millions of allocations by using a linked list

#44

Post by mbrock »

Semi-related: does anyone know why installing gems is so ridiculously slow? What is the thing doing? Downloading tarballs, yes, but then? It's a dynamic language; there is no compilation or verification! Why can I install Ruby packages using apt almost immediately, when gem/bundle install takes half a coffee break?

I'm growing more impatient with the years. I have measured out my life with slow software. We talk about saving developer time with dynamic languages, but, as Flight of the Conchords sang, the sneakers don't seem to get much cheaper; what are your overheads?

Re: Drop millions of allocations by using a linked list

#45

Post by raverbashing »

perdunov wrote: post #6
steipete wrote: post #3

Ruby people discovering algorithms ducks

Really. Every time I whine publicly how web programming people aren't familiar with even basic CS, I get a slap. But really, I should move to web programming. I'll be an expert computer scientist there, probably.

I was going to post the photoshopped joke, but this gets more to the gist of it

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3811678/add-two-variables...

Edit: found it https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DougTyrrell/posts/br3kqg6Vet6

Re: Drop millions of allocations by using a linked list

#46

Post by drinchev »

perdunov wrote: post #6
steipete wrote: post #3

Ruby people discovering algorithms ducks

Really. Every time I whine publicly how web programming people aren't familiar with even basic CS, I get a slap. But really, I should move to web programming. I'll be an expert computer scientist there, probably.

When I was in my early teenage years I was already making some development efforts on Pascal, VisualBasic and later on I switched to linux and started doing Perl CGI web apps.

Back in time when I had to choose if I want to do CS degree I was already paid as a web developer and doing what I was going to study for. Then I asked some friends that were actually studying CS and they told me that they have a very tight schedule with work in the following disciplines : FORTRAN, ASM, C, C++ . I told them that's too low-level for me and probably I will not use it for my work so I decided to go into completely different sphere ( I graduated law ).

Now I'm not the best programmer lived on the planet, but certainly I still do what I love and I'm paid for web development as high as a senior person, because of my experience - not CS degree.

So... If you think you can make benefit to web development, why don't you start with a simple open source contribution to any of the existing projects and reduce Wirth's law [1] a bit with some low-level skills. But for something more complicated, please consider some experience first in that specific area.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

Re: Drop millions of allocations by using a linked list

#49

Post by perdunov »

grey-area wrote: post #42
perdunov wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mistakes come for different reasons: the human brain's limitations; carelessness; bad methodologies; ignorance. I was talking about the last one here. "PS Rubygems isn't a web framework, it's a package management tool, so the straw man you're hacking away at is the wrong one." My statement about web frameworks was not about RubyGems, it was about web frameworks, and it was an example of the state of affairs in web de…

You think the original authors (Chad Fowler, Rich Kilmer, Jim Weirich) were ignorant of linked lists? What hubris. The story is about rubygems, not web dev.

I do? I was saying that being ignorant in CS may lead to lame mistakes, and I have seen many web developers who appeared ignorant in CS, and there has been a case of some central web framework with an O(n^2) queue.

Re: Drop millions of allocations by using a linked list

#50

Post by ishtu »

mbrock wrote: post #44

Semi-related: does anyone know why installing gems is so ridiculously slow? What is the thing doing? Downloading tarballs, yes, but then? It's a dynamic language; there is no compilation or verification! Why can I install Ruby packages using apt almost immediately, when gem/bundle install takes half a coffee break? I'm growing more impatient with the years. I have measured out my life with slow software. We talk abou…

  gem: --no-document --verbose
in your ~/.gemrc may speed up some things and show slowest steps (where '--no-document' means the same as deprecated '--no-rdoc --no-ri').
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