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From: pjg@acsu.Buffalo.EDU (Paul Graham)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Tradeoffs
Message-ID: <27416@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU>
Date: 3 Jun 90 21:42:31 GMT
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henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:

|Nobody is arguing that heroic efforts to keep software small are justified,
|barring rare special situations.  The unhappiness is with people who assign
|smallness a value of zero, and refuse to spend five minutes thinking about
|how to avoid gratuitous space waste in a many-hour project.

[cnews is then offerred as an example of careful programming.]

ok, if we're going to talk about code bumming then at least stay real.
this is a perfect example.  cnews was written to run on small address
space machines and it does so, as well as running much faster than the
competition.  so we see that with some care (but not heroic effort) one
can write reasonable sized programs.  cnews has a job and it does it
quite well with modest use of resources.

now i'd like to ask what would gnu emacs look like if henry wrote it
but he probably wouldn't; so a question.  has someone written something
comparable to gnu emacs that is significantly smaller?  has someone
written something comparable to x11r4 that is significantly smaller?
and i do mean comparable, not something along the lines of "well i
think jove is comparable to emacs" or "gee, mgr does everything i
need".  the larger programs do seem to offer a bit more than their
smaller counterparts.  there are small tools and larger ones.  we seem
to have a choice. programs of both types seem to be written regularly.

|As a user I'll take speed over|     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
|features any day. -A.Tanenbaum| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu

i think i'll still take bourbon over ice.