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Whenever Z-Bo writes I feel like there is a thought there, screaming to get out, but muffled by a blanket of words. I wish he would be more concise.
by wingo 17y ago
Whenever Z-Bo writes I feel like there is a thought there, screaming to get out, but muffled by a blanket of words. I wish he would be more concise.
- lucifer 17y agoI got the sense that he didn't grasp the point of Kent's paper (c.f. his remark regarding "N+1 schema"). I personally agree with Kent's view regarding the necessity for yet another (but final) abstraction layer to decouple semantic and logical abstractions. At some point in the future DSLs and Schemas will meet in a happy union to achieve this.
- mschy 17y agoTo quote one of the first engineers I ever worked with: "all problems can be solved with an additional layer of abstraction." except performance problems, of course.
- BigZaphod 17y ago"except performance problems, of course." Well, in some ways, even those can be solved with abstraction. The key is where that abstraction layer is placed. :) The assumption is you add them "on top" of what came before; but if you go in the other direction you may be able to improve performance by implementing, say, a smarter CPU with higher level abstractions built into the silicon. Things like that.
- lucifer 17y agoIf a problem is so critical that one of its side-effects earns the title "the vietnam of computer science", then I think it is 'ok' to put "performance" considerations on a secondary tier and first see if there is a solution to the problem, in principle.
- olavk 17y agoHigh level languages is also an example. C is really an abstraction layer upon machine code, but in most cases compilers produce faster code than what you would do if you wrote assembler. So C is an abstraction layer that helps you improve performance.
- lucifer 17y agoThen you seem to misunderstand the point. It is not a N+1 approach. There is a bound to N and that is 4.