[H-GEN] Which is better?

[Greg Black]

On 2004-04-26, Matthew Sellers wrote:
> Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> wrote:
>> But when somebody, student or not, asks a question on a mailing
>> list, the rules are quite different.  Nobody on the list is
>> *owed* the answer they want.
> 
> I agree. If you don't feel like answering them then don't hit the send
> button.

I did feel like answering, so that's what I did.  I discussed
the answer with other people on the list before posting it.  I'm
happy with it.

>> I do know that I wish that lots of modern programmers did care a
>> whole lot more about efficiency.  
>> 
>> I just started OpenOffice on a
>> Celeron-2200 with 1 GB of memory and it took over 10 seconds
>> before it was ready to allow me to start to interact with it.
> 
> But it is responsive once it is up, is it not.

More or less -- until the next time it crashes.  Which brings me
to the second thing I hate[1] about it -- instability.  And
then, when it crashes, I have to wait through the start-up time
again.

>> That is absurd and those programmers really should have spent
>> some time to make it respond in a reasonable amount of time.  It
>> seems as though people care in first year, but lose all interest
>> by the time they get to work.

To add a few comments to that, the point I'm making is that it's
just not impressive to see software that crashes, nor is it at
all impressive to wait forever while it starts up.

The solutions to both of these concerns are the sort of stuff
that should be covered in all undergraduate programming courses,
and that should be thoroughly understood by all programmers;
sadly, they both seem to be completely mysterious to far too
many people who think of themselves as programmers.

Cheers, Greg

[1] In case it's not clear, I don't hate OOo itself; I'm really
    delighted that it exists and that it odes as good a job as
    it does.  I'm just cross that trivial stuff like the things
    I was whining about are left to spoil it.
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