On 07/08/2014 12:51 PM, Mauricio Tavares wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 8, 2014 at 12:36 PM, Gilbert Sebenste
> <sebenste@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On Tue, 8 Jul 2014, Lamar Owen wrote:
>>
>>> Les, this is the wrong question to ask. The question I ask is 'What
>>> will be my return on investment be, in potentially lower costs, to run
>>> my programs in a different way?' If there is no ROI, or a really long
>>> ROI, well, I still have C6 to run until 2020 while I invest the time in
>>> determining if a new way is better or not. Fact is that all of the
>>> major Linux distributions are going this way; do you really think all of
>>> them would change if this change were stupid?
>> Yes. Look at Microsoft and Windows 8 and a similar attitude of "get over
>> it, and just buy it". I'm not surprised that the head developer
> Apple is guilty of that too.
> Consistency is not the only goal. Efficiency should trump consistency,
>> I am darn sick and tired about hearing of "efficiency". Efficiency does
>> not 100% translate to effective productivity. Furthermore, user
>> satisfaction is not counted into efficiency. I have heard people complain
>> about air conditioners with extremely high efficiencies. The problem is
>> that they don't put out much cold air. If the product is ineffective,
>> very hard to work with, but efficient...I'd far rather use something much
>> less cumbersome and effective but being less efficient. That translates
>> to higher productivity and satisfaction, which you really want.
>> Effectiveness and satisfaction should go hand in hand with efficiency,
>> every time.
>>
> I think you are making the case for maintainability. Efficiency
> is in a certain way what brought the Y2K bug. I'll take
> maintainability over efficiency any day if I can (design constrains)
> even if I was writing a game.
Nope I was there when we did the year 80 conversion going from single
digit years to two digit years. We just did not have the capacity and
we counted every byte in a record. We did Julian date format on tape
and did the conversion for display to save another byte. Efficiency?
We were desperate for every byte we could squeeze out. the US Post
Office created a standard so that all US cities (and supposedly streets)
could be entered in 14 characters or less. We changed the abbreviation
of Nebraska from NB to NE (I remember writing that conversion program)
so we could more easily mix US and Canada addresses (those they would
not change their 6 character code to our 5 digit one). We burned CPU to
save storage. then rewrote key routines in assembler and hacked the
COBOL calls to make it all work.
Things change. Design goals change. Systems have to change.
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