Re: Extremely naive view of software engineering Was Re: [OT] was: Where is NSList? (All Threads)
Re: Extremely naive view of software engineering Was Re: [OT] was: Where is NSList? (All Threads)
- Subject: Re: Extremely naive view of software engineering Was Re: [OT] was: Where is NSList? (All Threads)
- From: Marco Scheurer <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 16:38:24 +0200
AnOn Jul 30, 2004, at 3:52 PM, Erik M. Buck wrote:
A very good programmer will first:
1) analyse his data structures and required methods (procedures)
2) available languages and resources
3) intended distribution (effects choices in 2)
4) time table for development
Ok, I got a great laugh out of the above quote. I am still smiling. I
would have thought by now that this type of naiveti was so thoroughly
discredited that universities would no longer teach it.
Yeah, the data structure + procedures seems dated. I was under the
impression that "structured design" had been dead for 10 or 15 years...
It is particularly
ironic or perhaps sad that the poster went on to list the archetypical
example of premature optimization. He described a way to make matrix
arithmetic much more computationally efficient by making the
algorithm/code
much more complex. The whole point is that there is no need to make
the
code more complex unless profiling reveals that matrix multiplication
is the
performance bottleneck in the system.
And who is still implementing matrix multiplication anyway when
optimized and trusted packages such as CBLAS or SparseBLAS exist? With
the additonal benefit, on Mac OS X of using Altivec for free...
Finally, just to ridicule traditional "Software Engineering" for fun:
Any software development process that requires the existence of
complete and
correct requirements is doomed to failure. [...]
I agree of course... it's sad to think that the "everything can and
should be known in advance" school is still going strong. There is an
historic reason for trying to specify and plan everything on paper:
punching and running a program was extremely costly. Change was costly.
Nowadays, with our tools, change is cheap and time should not be wasted
on extensive analysis and design phases.
Marco Scheurer
Sen:te, Lausanne, Switzerland
http://www.sente.ch
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