In article ,
Terje Mathisen writes:
| Bill Davidsen wrote:
|
| That's not a bad thing, but performance is generally not an issue now,
| other than people writing brute force solutions because they're gamers,
| not programmers, and believe that hardware should make crappy code look
| good anyway.
|
| This otoh is totally bogus:

Oh, come now! It's not TOTALLY bogus - just largely so.

| Games programming is probably the only existing source of new
| programmers who actually care about performance, care to an extent where
| even 25% speedups are a big deal.

Nope. HPC provides some, too. Not a lot, but a few.

And most of the people Bill Davidsen were talking about (i.e. who write
crappy code and believe that it is the hardware's business to make it
run fast) are in neither gaming nor HPC. In those areas, people learn
better - in other areas, they can get away with being idiotic, sloppy
and just plain crazy.

E.g. you can explain why, as time goes by, GUIs get slower at popping
up new windows and even responding to mouse clicks - but most people
(even most GUI programmers) can't.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.