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From: rhyde@hubbell.ucr.edu (randy hyde)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc
Subject: Re: Geoworks
Message-ID: <15223@ucrmath.ucr.edu>
Date: 12 Jun 91 23:45:33 GMT
References: <1991Jun11.122522.26314@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu> <1991Jun11.210447.18721@actrix.gen.nz> <15187@ucrmath.ucr.edu> <1991Jun12.205801.754@actrix.gen.nz>
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Reply-To: rhyde@hubbell.ucr.edu (randy hyde)
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I sure hope "writing software the way I want to..." implies that you're writing
software the way you want to *USE* it rather than writing it the way  you want
to *write* it.  The biggest problem I see with software today is that "software
engineers" are much more interested in expending the minimum effort to create
the program.  While this may be a good thing from the software development $$$
point of view, minimizing software development time is often done at the
expense
of usability, efficiency, performance, and even other highly touted software
engineering goals such as portability and maintainability.  True, C++ is
a great
language and it is possible to write efficient programs in C++.  However, as
Donald Knuth once said, most programmers get lazy and take the easiest way out
that the language at hand offers.  Although you *can* write efficient programs
in C++ (or any other similar HLL), programmers rarely do.  It's so much easier
to write inefficient programs.  In assembly language it's obvious the price
you're paying.  HLLs hide too much of this.  Of course, if you're writing a
program and performance doesn't matter, who cares?  Get the job done as fast
as possible.  But if you are trying to market a product, keep your users in
mind.  The six months extra it takes a *good* assembly language programmer to
develop a product in assembly rather than C gets paid back rather quickly in
use if you have 10,000 uses saving only a few minutes each day.  If you
have no competition, or you have some unique feature no one else has,
users may put up
with a slower product, for a while.  But if you wind up with decent competition
and your product is in C and their's is in assembly, you could get
slaughtered in
the marketplace.