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Grace Hopper to Programmers: Mind Your Nanoseconds (highscalability.com)
81 points by jnazario on Jan 12, 2013 | hide | past | favorite | 13 comments


Rant inspired by seeing her for the 5th time this week:

It's like every time I hear about Grace Hopper, it's got to do with a piece of wire. Or tube. And any comments on it are usually strangely excited, almost awestruck. What's up, people? She did some other stuff too. Like, no big deal back then, writing a god damn compiler.

It's like people treat her like a dancing bear. Look, woman! Look, uniform! Look, she said "nano"! Take a step back and a deep breath. Chill out.

"Bike shed" comes to mind, in a weird way.


Darn Hipsters.


From SICP:

> Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

When programmers care about lack of efficiency before it's a problem, they're doing it wrong.


until you get to the end game and you realise you have a lemon on your hands which is going to require a rewrite because it's so slow when you throw 10,000 users at it...

"Be mindful" is probably better advice. Tradeoffs are easier to make earlier on and everything is a compromise after all.


What I said was:

> When programmers care about lack of efficiency before it's a problem, they're doing it wrong.

That doesn't mean that you shouldn't identify problems as quickly as possible, just don't try to improve performance when you haven't got a problem in front of you.


Or, as Donald Knuth put it, "premature optimization is the root of all evil."


That also affects sensor resolution, if your processor is counting the clock cycles while photons are flying through the air. Like radar.


The article is ok, the video is a must watch. She's witty.


third or fourth time this has been posted within the past 12 months.

I sure hope someone posts the Letterman interview with her next, so I can see that to the nth as well.


And it's the first time I've seen it. What exactly is the point of the negativity? If it's annoying to the community as a whole, it won't be voted up. If it isn't, and you don't like it, you're wasting energy by clicking and commenting sarcastically.



Your account is only 47 days old?


HN cannot be read without an account?




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