7 Jun
2005
7 Jun
'05
1:23 p.m.
On Tue, 7 Jun 2005 10:18 , Paul Winkler <pw_lists(a)slinkp.com> sent:
On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 04:12:27PM -0500, Jan Depner
wrote:
Too true. That's why I comment like a madman ;-)
Jan
I just have to respond to this. I have been
writing code for 27
years and every time I get a neophyte programmer in they want to cut
corners to save programming time. Here's the bottom line - if it saves
you a day in coding but costs the user 3/4 of a second in application
time would you consider that a good tradeoff? Not if you have over 100
users and they're having to deal with that 3/4 of a second 20 or so
times a day, every day for a year. Remember, it's only hard for you to
program it correctly once - it's a PITA for the user many times a day.
I sort of agree, with the very large caveat that "once" is unlikely.
The time to write the code is often dwarfed by the time to maintain
the code. So your optimizations had damn well better be as readable
as you can make them, and well-commented.