Kevin Wampler wrote:
> It seems like a pretty common double-edged sword. 

Yep.

> Smarter systems often 
> allow you to do things more easily at the cost of the need for more 
> mental space required to know when the smart system will fail and how to 
> correct it.

I think the best model is something SQL-like. Where you express the 
semantics of what you want, and then in a separate place say "by the way, 
here's hints to make it faster."

It's also the case that, generally speaking, there are on occasion things 
you can make more efficient in a higher-level language than a lower-level 
language, simply because there's more information about intent there. As in, 
it's way easier for C to micro-optimize my call to memcpy() than it is to 
micro-optimize my while loop that does semantically the same thing. And it's 
way easier for the SQL interpreter to figure out the best access pattern 
than it is for my C compiler to analyze my code along with the BDM to figure 
out how to optimize access.

Unfortunately, there are relatively few high-level languages that actually 
give you the option of telling the system how best to optimize stuff, even 
tho the concept has been around for ages.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."

Post a reply to this message