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I believe it's what used to be called 'craftsmanship'. Taking pride in creating things that are efficient and not wasteful for no other reason than the desire t

I believe it's what used to be called 'craftsmanship'. Taking pride in creating things that are efficient and not wasteful for no other reason than the desire to make the best product possible.

PhasmaFelis 13y ago
A beautifully carved chair may display excellent craftsmanship, but if you spend three months carving the world's most beautiful chair when the client asked for a dozen basic ladderbacks for a dinner party next Friday, you're not a very wise craftsman. Similarly, if your software runs in 1% of CPU on a typical customer's machine, spending 10x the time and resources to make it run in 0.1% is not laudable. Context is everything.
- logicchains 13y ago
  >Similarly, if your software runs in 1% of CPU on a typical customer's machine, spending 10x the time and resources to make it run in 0.1% is not laudable. No, but spending 1.2x the time and resources might be. That's not an unreasonable proposition; something written in Go, C# or Scala can run 10 to 100 times faster than the equivalent code in Ruby, but it certainly doesn't take 10 to 100 times longer to write the code. It also conserves resources; you're reducing the amount of the world's non-renewable energy that your app consumes by up to 90%. You're also freeing up your users' machines to do more things simultaneously while running your program, potentially increasing the user's enjoyment of the system in the case of a desktop app.
  - PhasmaFelis 13y ago
    True! I'm just saying that good craftsmanship lies in understanding the situation and finding an appropriate balance. Ultra-efficient code is virtuous, but it's not the only virtue.
usea 13y ago
It is wasteful to spend time doing something that benefits nobody, or where the benefits outweigh the cost. Your time is worth something.
- logicchains 13y ago
  The point I was trying to make is that if you spend your time to make something that works really efficiently, and you take pride in it, then you haven't wasted your time. It doesn't benefit nobody, it benefits yourself, because you can take pride in your work. At least, I believe this idea is part of what's implied in the traditional notion of 'craftsmanship'. An example might be working nine hours per day rather than eight to produce something that only uses 10% of the resources (and that extra hour is unpaid). For some people, that extra hour would be a waste, but for others, it would bring them greater satisfaction knowing they'd delivered a more efficient product, even if it brought them no extra revenue.
  - dagw 13y ago
    Except the difference at the margin is never just an extra hour of a day. It's almost always weeks instead of days or years instead of month. And that is fine when you are doing things for yourself and have no other requirements on your time, but when you're being paid spending two month on something instead of week just pisses everybody around you off. I mean don't get me wrong, I'm working on a project right now that I'd love to do 'right'. Spend weeks doing a literature study to catch up on and really understand the current state of the art, then implement three or four different approaches to really get a feel how they work under real world conditions. After that I would try to pick the best aspects of those algorithms and try to write some really smart code that analyses the input and picks the best algorithm based on the data. Then I would tune that code until it is as fast, stable and memory efficient as possible and finally put a really slick UI on top of it. Trust me, nothing would give me greater satisfaction. Unfortunately I got the project late last week, deadline is in less than two weeks and I have two other projects I'm working on in parallel. So I'm going to end up grabbing some off the shelf solution, tweaking it until it works well enough, wrapping it in up in some hacky shell script and make up for inefficiency by throwing more hardware at the problem. It's not optimal, but deadlines are deadlines, and I'll have a contend myself with the satisfaction of getting a job done well enough on time, rather than a job done perfectly.

I believe it's what used to be called 'craftsmanship'. Taking pride in creating things that are efficient and not wasteful for no other reason than the desire to make the best product possible.

PhasmaFelis 13y ago

A beautifully carved chair may display excellent craftsmanship, but if you spend three months carving the world's most beautiful chair when the client asked for a dozen basic ladderbacks for a dinner party next Friday, you're not a very wise craftsman. Similarly, if your software runs in 1% of CPU on a typical customer's machine, spending 10x the time and resources to make it run in 0.1% is not laudable. Context is everything.

logicchains 13y ago
>Similarly, if your software runs in 1% of CPU on a typical customer's machine, spending 10x the time and resources to make it run in 0.1% is not laudable. No, but spending 1.2x the time and resources might be. That's not an unreasonable proposition; something written in Go, C# or Scala can run 10 to 100 times faster than the equivalent code in Ruby, but it certainly doesn't take 10 to 100 times longer to write the code. It also conserves resources; you're reducing the amount of the world's non-renewable energy that your app consumes by up to 90%. You're also freeing up your users' machines to do more things simultaneously while running your program, potentially increasing the user's enjoyment of the system in the case of a desktop app.
- PhasmaFelis 13y ago
  True! I'm just saying that good craftsmanship lies in understanding the situation and finding an appropriate balance. Ultra-efficient code is virtuous, but it's not the only virtue.

usea 13y ago

It is wasteful to spend time doing something that benefits nobody, or where the benefits outweigh the cost. Your time is worth something.

logicchains 13y ago
The point I was trying to make is that if you spend your time to make something that works really efficiently, and you take pride in it, then you haven't wasted your time. It doesn't benefit nobody, it benefits yourself, because you can take pride in your work. At least, I believe this idea is part of what's implied in the traditional notion of 'craftsmanship'. An example might be working nine hours per day rather than eight to produce something that only uses 10% of the resources (and that extra hour is unpaid). For some people, that extra hour would be a waste, but for others, it would bring them greater satisfaction knowing they'd delivered a more efficient product, even if it brought them no extra revenue.
- dagw 13y ago
  Except the difference at the margin is never just an extra hour of a day. It's almost always weeks instead of days or years instead of month. And that is fine when you are doing things for yourself and have no other requirements on your time, but when you're being paid spending two month on something instead of week just pisses everybody around you off. I mean don't get me wrong, I'm working on a project right now that I'd love to do 'right'. Spend weeks doing a literature study to catch up on and really understand the current state of the art, then implement three or four different approaches to really get a feel how they work under real world conditions. After that I would try to pick the best aspects of those algorithms and try to write some really smart code that analyses the input and picks the best algorithm based on the data. Then I would tune that code until it is as fast, stable and memory efficient as possible and finally put a really slick UI on top of it. Trust me, nothing would give me greater satisfaction. Unfortunately I got the project late last week, deadline is in less than two weeks and I have two other projects I'm working on in parallel. So I'm going to end up grabbing some off the shelf solution, tweaking it until it works well enough, wrapping it in up in some hacky shell script and make up for inefficiency by throwing more hardware at the problem. It's not optimal, but deadlines are deadlines, and I'll have a contend myself with the satisfaction of getting a job done well enough on time, rather than a job done perfectly.