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Programming Practices

Just a little semi rant about ppl's idea of programming practice.
If you want to be insulting go down the pub and insult the 20 stone rugby player at the bar, if you want to have a civilized discussion about this by all means post.

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I've been reading a lot of angry posts by ppl recently saying VB's to slow for decent programs, or optimize your code otherwise its useless, and i thought i'd throw my 2 pence worth in.

First off there are no completely unbreakable rules in programming except the syntax of the language you are writeing in.

I've seen ppl saying you always have to optimize. Untrue, you should optimize when required and to the level required. Speaking from a business sense 15 years ago you had to optimize.

Why? because processor time - how much money you had to pay for the program to run was much more expensive than the time of the programmers to develop it.

Now, however the reverse is true Programmer time is more expensive than processor time. Therefore you want to decrease the time the program takes to develop, even if that means the program is less optimized.

Also why would you want to optimize a user interface, for say a wordprocessor?

Even the worse messyest unoptimized code will react at several magnitudes greater than a user can.

Another example is the use of goto, i was always taught never to use the goto statement.

Well since then i have found times when GOTO was the best way of accomplishing something. There was others. but goto was the easiest, and fastest because it used the least lines of code.

Heres another point - if it was always necessary to have the most optimized code in the world we would all still be programming in machine code. A program written in machine code would be many times faster than a program written in even assembler, but how long would it take to write?

I know ppl who used to write in pure machine code many many moons ago. They actually copied this codes from books that contained full computer games in machine code form.

It required three ppl. One reading the 1's and 0's one tapping them in and one to check what he had typed. Even copying from the book in this method took weeks, and then weeks more to go through the thousands of lines of code and debug it.

All i'm saying is times and technology change, and because of this programming practices have to change too.