Re: A 21st Century Apple II?

[Leif Strand <leif@geodynamics.org>]

On Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:03:25 +1100, Mark McDougall wrote:
> Time - not logic gates
> - is money these days, so you'd be stupid to pay top $$$ to have top
> engineers spending weeks or months trying to squeeze a design into a
> part that's only $0.50 cheaper in volume - not to mention kill your
> time-to-market.

Indeed.  "Programmer time" is even a topic of dicussion at the places I've
worked.  It's viewed as a valuable resource that must be conserved.  As in,
"it isn't worth your time to work on XYZ".  Even for silly stuff -- like
when somebody runs out of disk space:  "don't waste your time cleaning the
junk off your hard drive -- we'll just buy you a new, bigger one."

I learned to program on the Apple II, and it had a permanent effect on my
"programmer imagination" (if you will) in terms of what I imagine a
computer to be capable of.  This can be a liability in today's world.  I
remember that my IIgs wasn't fast enough to even clear the screen in the
blanking interval between screen refreshes (and there were crazy tricks
like mapping the stack onto the display buffer to eek out every drop of
performance).  Especially when coding in C/C++, sometimes I have to remind
myself that computers are a zillion times faster now; that it is a waste
of my time to micro-optimize the routine I happen to be staring at.

Thankfully, programming in a language like Python somehow frees my mind
from such thoughts.  (I've found it's best not to think about how the
Python interpreter is implemented.  Like what they say about sausages.)

--Leif Strand