Programming, performance vs complexity

[bolson]

Programming almost isn't about performance anymore. Performance has to be good enough, but most problems are small enough that's pretty easy. Most of the programming problems at my current and previous job are about managing complexity. We have to write a big complex piece of code that manages lots of attributes and has lots of rules and does lots of actions. We have to do that in a way such that it works in the short term of days or weeks for whatever feature we're adding this time, and we have to do that in such a way that we can come back to it next month or next year and do something completely different.

Comments

[mangosteen]

Something I may have said in the recent past:

"You see all of this? This is the result of 14 years of cycling through building something that's necessarily complex, creating the tools to manage that complexity to the point where it's possible to build on top of it, and building even more complexity. That's what we do,here. That's likely what you'll do, here."

[twonky.livejournal.com]

I don't remember where you are anymore, but performance is still pretty big at HP. Especially since we get customer complaints about it on a regular basis. 3 seconds is too long! The job must get there in <.5 seconds (never mind that we have no control over the network setup).

[flexagon]

This seems to be totally true for everything except a) websites and b) mobile apps and other embedded (small device) things.