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I think there was a story about a mainframe salesman who at demonstration time with the customer started the usual demo program. The perspective customer then s

I think there was a story about a mainframe salesman who at demonstration time with the customer started the usual demo program. The perspective customer then suggested to leave for lunch and come back when the machine had finished—but then the printer already started to churn out pages, after just a few seconds. Turned out the new compiler was smarter than the old one and had simply erased all the inconsequential computations of the demo code which made it look like magic. Apocryphal, from memory, many details probably wrong.

quickthrower2 4y ago
Legend says the customer didn’t buy the mainframe because he didn’t believe the results could be accurate when they came out so quickly. So a programmer was asked to put a sleep of 2700 seconds, slightly less time than the local steakhouse can can serve the prospects lunch.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  That reminds me of the first time I tried jikes over javac. Javac took about 45 seconds to compile a hello-world. Jikes ran in well under a second. I thought I had done something wrong it was so much faster