Hacker News Reader

Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for that. After five solid years of professional web development, I have to say that I only have to implement or think about algorithms exceedingly rarely, while naming and organization consume the lion's share of my time.

My view on coders who insist so vehemently that "performance ALWAYS matters!!" dims more and more every year. At this point they sound more like basement trolls than real craftsmen.

View on HN

Performance always matters. People often tend to shut that argument down quoting "Premature optimization is the root of all evil". My opinion is that this quote was never meant to say "Performance/Optimization as a whole is the root of all evil".

If you don't have to care about it, it's because someone else did it for you. And if everyone cared a little, the web would be better place for the users(40MB for a single website maybe ?). (Not talking about other areas than web development here...)

Just think about it twice before dismissing that argument.

It doesn't always matter if your application only has a handful of users (plenty of internal applications) and defaults works at a reasonable speed. Also there are plenty of scripts that need to be run once and once only to get data from one place to another. Optimizing for performance then is pretty pointless.

Nope. I happen to be a product manager for one of such internal applications with around 60 users. This can be considered as a handful of users when compared to the internet scale. Getting the product adopted even for such a small group was a big pain. The primary complaint - it is slow! After two rounds of performance optimizations, the adoption velocity for new features has increased 10x.

Performance does always matter, but for practical software development, everyone should realize that someone else did it better. The most optimal data structures and sorting algorithms have already been implemented numerous times in all programming languages; a good craftsman only needs to know when to use them and why. On the other side, the person implementing said most optimal sort should know why it's most optimal and be able to explain to others every property of their implementation.

While agreeing to the fact that performance does always matter, I think the idea that "someone else did it better" is not always a good one. One should always understand the limitations of standard implementations and see if hand-crafting something of their own would benefit their application.

For example, consider the case of sorting. Even though asymptotically efficient algorithms have been known for about 70 years now, Timsort - the currently standard implementation found in Python, Java and probably other languages - was invented as recently as in 2002.

This is not all. What if you have multiple cores available to run your code? What if your dataset is large and locality of reference matters? What if your dataset has certain special properties which the standard implementation doesn't exploit?

I agree that maybe 99% of the time, we can get away using the standard implementation but that 1% is what differentiates great from the merely good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com