4 ms·
> If it's faster, they can benchmark before and after That goes bad very fast. I've worked with someone who tried winning arguments with one-line microbenchmar
by madflame991 9y ago
> If it's faster, they can benchmark before and after
That goes bad very fast. I've worked with someone who tried winning arguments with one-line microbenchmarks; They even tried to convince me that I should always use undefined over null in JS since one is faster than the other (forgot which).
> Introduce them to the concept of static single assignment form
I failed with this as well; some coders don't trust the compiler/runtime at all. I had people tell me that garbage collectors don't deal with cyclic dependencies or that "simple comparisons" (<, >, ==) are faster than "compound comparisons" (<=, >=).
- nerdponx 9y agoTo be fair, in R on my machine > and < seem to be faster than ==, at least for integers. But the difference is miniscule compared to the overhead of doing just about anything else.
- arethuza 9y agoCraziest one I remember from my Java years (long long ago) was someone claiming that returning values by throwing exceptions and catching them to extract the return value was faster than simply returning the value.... This was wrong on a number of levels.
- sgc 9y agoTo be fair, they must have been full on bats--t insane.
- cwyers 9y agoOh come on, this is obvious. Thrown things are fast. Anyone who's ever rented a VHS tape from Blockbuster knows that returning something can take days. Of course he's right.
- arethuza 9y agoAlso, I once worked with who someone who mixed up exit() and C return in a library he wrote....