DaWei

This is a great story. Perhaps it will yield some insight in how to go about being a valuable employee.

I'm not saying that fighting for every last gain in execution time, or every last byte of footprint is the way to go. Far from it. I think if you have read many of my posts, you will find that I'm a great fan of abstraction.

An example: I once spent three weeks whittling seven bytes from my code. It was an economical venture. Failure would have entailed doubling the amount of memory at an exorbitant cost. If one multiplied that cost by the number of units being produced, the product would have been a sure loser. I would shoot myself if I had to do that today.

The point is: do the best you can given today's realities. When tomorrow comes, change appropriately.

In the past, hard resources were much more expensive than the average programmer's time. The same is not true today. One must learn to balance.

In simple terms, the cost of a product is the recurring cost + the non-recurring costs divided by the number of units produced. For a first approximation, grade-school math is all you need. Good managers and bean-counters can make the finer adjustments. When programmers are more expensive than resources, RAD and judicious resource waste is the way to go.

If you want to be valuable, consider these things. Consider the impact. If you don't care, don't worry about it too much. You will be kept in the realm of code monkey/robot.

Enjoy the read: real programmers.

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Abstraction doesn't make it impossible to write bad code; it makes it possible to write superior code.
Contributor's Corner: Grumpy on C++ Exceptions DaWei on Pointers

Grich

I have a Mel like character in the course I'm doing. He is arrogant and anti social, but man he can really write some killer code. He gets bad marks because the teachers can't understand his code. But he is brilliant.
These days programmers don't have to understand the lower level features of what they are doing. Most of the time it isn't worth it. Processors are faster, the language itself automates it. For example, C++, you create pointers, JAVA it is "automated". It is good and bad at the same time.
Good little article, I enjoy reading about the "old school" ways of programming in lower level.

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Jimbo

He may be brilliant, but maintainability is also a very important part of coding. I'm thinking he got low scores in that category.

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<insert shameless plug for Visual Studio here>

ZenMasterJG

Some quick googling reveals that computer in the story cost $47,000 in 1957 dollars (The equivalent of $341,819 today!)
It used 31 bit words, and the drum could store 4096 of them, for a grand total of 126976 bits. Thats 124 kibibits, or, roughly, 1/1.056*10^-7 th the storage capacity of my $900-last-year laptop.

Yeah, screw the optimizing compiler.

hollystyles

Lol. That's From a very different era indeed! Optimization aside. If I refused to implement something and then implemented the opposite of what my boss requested. I don't think 'Greener pastures' would be a likely destination for me! No matter how greasy the code

Granted of course so far my boss has never required anything moraly questionable of me.

Grich

Yeah, he did unfortunately. I keep telling him that.

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Baphomet

If you can't write code others can read, you won't get jobs where you have to collaborate with others on the same project, using the same code; Many (most) jobs require this skill. I suffered from this during school and a while after. But I grew from it. I learned to how to write code with others in mind. I didn't prefer it, but I learned to do it. I often avoided jobs where I had to work with others in programming. But on the other hand some employers liked that I had the ability to program by myself with no other help needed. It was much cheaper.

Now that I'm retired, I no longer need to program with other people in mind, because I only program as a hobby.

InfiNate

Didn't realize storage capacity kicked the ass out of anything we have today.