On 07/08/2014 12:51 PM, Mauricio Tavares wrote:
On Tue, Jul 8, 2014 at 12:36 PM, Gilbert Sebenste sebenste@weather.admin.niu.edu wrote:
On Tue, 8 Jul 2014, Lamar Owen wrote:
Les, this is the wrong question to ask. The question I ask is 'What will be my return on investment be, in potentially lower costs, to run my programs in a different way?' If there is no ROI, or a really long ROI, well, I still have C6 to run until 2020 while I invest the time in determining if a new way is better or not. Fact is that all of the major Linux distributions are going this way; do you really think all of them would change if this change were stupid?
Yes. Look at Microsoft and Windows 8 and a similar attitude of "get over it, and just buy it". I'm not surprised that the head developer
Apple is guilty of that too.Consistency is not the only goal. Efficiency should trump consistency,
I am darn sick and tired about hearing of "efficiency". Efficiency does not 100% translate to effective productivity. Furthermore, user satisfaction is not counted into efficiency. I have heard people complain about air conditioners with extremely high efficiencies. The problem is that they don't put out much cold air. If the product is ineffective, very hard to work with, but efficient...I'd far rather use something much less cumbersome and effective but being less efficient. That translates to higher productivity and satisfaction, which you really want. Effectiveness and satisfaction should go hand in hand with efficiency, every time.
I think you are making the case for maintainability. Efficiencyis in a certain way what brought the Y2K bug. I'll take maintainability over efficiency any day if I can (design constrains) even if I was writing a game.
Nope I was there when we did the year 80 conversion going from single digit years to two digit years. We just did not have the capacity and we counted every byte in a record. We did Julian date format on tape and did the conversion for display to save another byte. Efficiency? We were desperate for every byte we could squeeze out. the US Post Office created a standard so that all US cities (and supposedly streets) could be entered in 14 characters or less. We changed the abbreviation of Nebraska from NB to NE (I remember writing that conversion program) so we could more easily mix US and Canada addresses (those they would not change their 6 character code to our 5 digit one). We burned CPU to save storage. then rewrote key routines in assembler and hacked the COBOL calls to make it all work.
Things change. Design goals change. Systems have to change.