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Re: Mac OS X Java Performance

Peter Wayner wrote:

I was once at a programming interview. One geek, who didn't want to hire me, was giving me questions. He asked me to solve some problem so I wrote out 20 lines using primitives. He announced that I was obviously a loser because there's a library routine that could accomplish the same task in one line of code. One Line! That's elegance and efficiency.

After a few minutes I realized that no one knew how many primitives the library routine would execute. It could be hundreds because the library routine was pretty general and designed to handle regular expressions. After I pointed this out, the question of elegance and efficiency was dropped.

Your point is valid in terms of CPU-efficiency, but there is also the problem of programmer-efficiency. By calling a library routine you are reducing the amount of new code which needs to be written, validated and maintained (since the library should hopefully be correct and maintained by others), and your programmer can basically do more work.

Then, if profiling shows that code to be a bottleneck, it can be optimized, but before that I would also consider the library call to be elegant and efficient :)

--
Thorbjoern Ravn Andersen Scandiatransplant
Skejby Sygehus, indgang 3
+45 89 49 53 01 DK-8200 AArhus N
http://biobase.dk/~tra _______________________________________________
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References: 
 >Re: Mac OS X Java Performance (From: Todd Blanchard <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Mac OS X Java Performance (From: Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Mac OS X Java Performance (From: Peter Wayner <email@hidden>)



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