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Usually I had funny but opposite experience when doing consulting for performance optimizations. At some points either teams converged to people without basic
by bluesign 5y ago
Usually I had funny but opposite experience when doing consulting for performance optimizations.
At some points either teams converged to people without basic knowledge of data structures or they rushed with something that works (when N in O(N) was small) then scaled up. They get used to lower performance slowly like boiled frog.
Then someone is tasked with optimization, but instead of attacking data structure at hand, usually those people tried to optimize pieces of the puzzle for smaller gain, then they ended up with small hacks to shave some execution time, with unmaintainable code which lead to serious bugs.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y agoThis is the kind of observation that should be central to CS, but isn't. While academic algorithm astronauts write papers which include Greek math symbols and can be proven correct, most people do... something else. Optimising the something else would be a huge benefit to the industry. But no one even looks at it. It's just a thing that happens, and there's no research into fixing it or making it better.
- miloignis 5y agoI feel like this is moving in the opposite direction! I think the issue is that most of the time the "something else" people write with poor algorithms is actually an application of the correct, efficient algorithms from formal papers written by academics, but they don't know it and thus don't use it.