Re: one-line programs

[mdj <mdj.mdj@gmail.com>]

On Feb 1, 12:12 pm, "Michael J. Mahon" <mjma...@aol.com> wrote:

> > I remember typing in one example that rendered the Mandelbrot set in
> > hires, then waiting the 5-6 hours for it to render, just because of
> > found it ingenious :-)
>
> A direct evaluation of the Mandelbrot set at hires takes about seven
> hours whether it's a one-liner or not.  ;-)  I use it as a demonstration
> of "embarrassing parallelism" for the AppleCrate--in fact, I used it at
> KansasFest (though the demo was interrupted by my zapping it with ESD!).

Yikes! I hope the zap only interrupted the network or reset a host;
I'd not enjoy the job of replacing a shift register on slave 10 :-)

> With 16 processors running it, and "jobs" assigned by line number, it
> get linear speedup, and runs in about 26 minutes--so the plan was that
> it would finish by around the middle of my talk.  ;-)

Fun to watch it render too, I bet!

> > These days we havehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_International_Obfuscated_C_Code_Contest
> > which carries on 'spirit' of the exercise. I however always thought it
> > would be far more fun to have an International self-documenting code
> > contest ;-)
>
> Hear, hear!
>
> I think that Knuth's Literate Programming was the best example of
> code documentation that I've ever seen.  Dijkstra used to say that
> any functioning code was like the tip of an iceberg in comparison to
> the large amount of documentation required to justify it.  That sounds
> about right, and would translate to 250-500 lines of commentary for
> every 50 lines of code.

Sounds right to me too. I've not had a change to look much at Literate
Programming, but it's on that heap-based back burner somewhere ...

Matt