From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.2 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID, REPLYTO_WITHOUT_TO_CC autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: fc89c,97188312486d4578 X-Google-Attributes: gidfc89c,public X-Google-Thread: 109fba,baaf5f793d03d420 X-Google-Attributes: gid109fba,public X-Google-Thread: 1014db,6154de2e240de72a X-Google-Attributes: gid1014db,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,97188312486d4578 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: jamie@csd.uwo.ca (J. Blustein) Subject: Re: What's the best language to start with? [was: Re: Should I learn C or Pascal?] Date: 1996/08/09 Message-ID: <4ufbmd$2e0@falcon.ccs.uwo.ca>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 173416466 references: <31FBC584.4188@ivic.qc.ca> <01bb8534$b2718bc0$87ee6fce@timpent.airshields.com> <4ud81d$5ii@solutions.solon.com> summary: Let's concern ourselves with effectiveness not efficiency organization: Computer Science Dept., Univ. of Western Ontario, London, Canada keywords: efficency optimization reply-to: jamie@csd.uwo.ca newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++,comp.unix.programmer,comp.lang.ada disclaimer: It's people like you what cause unrest! x-copyright: copyright (c) J. Blustein, 1996. All rights reserved Date: 1996-08-09T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article <4ud81d$5ii@solutions.solon.com>, Peter Seebach wrote: >Abstraction is a trade-off of maintainability and readability vs. code >speed. Can we say that we should be concerned with issues of effectiveness instead of efficency? I know that, as programmers, we pursuing elegance and that an important part of that is efficency, but it is not the most important aspect. Finally, there are outside concerns such as deadlines. >If I could arrange to need only one of those five arrays, I bet my code would >be faster than yours, no matter *how* much you optimized it. I really didn't want to get dragged into this discussion, but I very much wanted to make that one point. It has been made before, but I found that referring to effectiveness made the point clearer for me. -- J. Blustein http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~jamie/.Refs/C-refs.html