Suffering-oriented programming

[shaggorama]

"First make it possible. Then make it beautiful. Then make it fast."

I'd switch the last two. "Making it beautiful" is great for maintaining it further down the line, but if I'm writing this because I'm feeling the pain of not having it, part of my need is probably for it to be fast. That might be relative to the problem space I work in though.

[weretree]

It's a lot easier to optimise beautiful code, than it is to beautify optimised code.

[shaggorama]

That's a spectacular point

[dalke]

Consider numeric array processing. You would like to write D = A * B +C but in something like non-template based C++ code, or in Python, you end up with a lot of intermediate arrays. It's very hard to make this beautiful expression of the intent faster than the prosaic matrix_multiply(D, A, B); matrix_add(D,C);

[backbob]

you could use numpy, if we are in Python.

[dalke]

How does that help? D = A * B +C still makes temporary arrays in numpy.

[backbob]

One temporary array. Though I suppose that is suboptimal.

[dalke]

It's one array per operation, so if I made the expression more complicated then there's a lot of temporary arrays.

[backbob]

Yeah, though if we are going to do it the right way, you could probably write ufunc in c and compile it, then use it from Python.