[BangPypers] parsing xml

[Sidu Ponnappa]

+1.

On Fri, Jul 29, 2011 at 12:20 PM, Noufal Ibrahim <noufal at gmail.com> wrote:
> Venkatraman S <venkat83 at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> On Fri, Jul 29, 2011 at 11:31 AM, Noufal Ibrahim <noufal at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> > I am a speed-maniac and crave for speed; so if the assumption is
>>> > valid, i can vouch for the fact that regexp would be faster and neater
>>> > solution. I have done some speed experiments in past on this (results
>>> > of which i do not have handy), and i found this.
>>>
>>> Premature optimisation is the root of all evil.
>>>
>>
>> I belong to a different school. I think about performance right from the
>> design dashboards for i think, be it a simple webapp or a financial
>> application, the choice of your design patterns and techstack goes a long
>> way in a good customer experience. Bulk of my thoughts are reflected in here
>> :
>> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/performance-is-a-feature.html
>
> I agree and I try my best to do the same thing. However, I differentiate
> between micro optimsations like rewriting parts in C and XML and top
> level optimisations like good design and the right data structures.
>
> The former, I don't do because I get bogged down by the details and end
> up delivering something that's super fast *really* late. The latter, I
> do because otherwise, the application is unusable and a bad
> experience. Also, micro optimising (e.g. replacing DOM parsing with
> regexps to extract stuff out of an XML message) makes code more brittle
> which is also a no win for the customer.
>
> I end up messing with the former only when I've exhausted all other
> avenues and *really* need that last drop of juice. This is usually
> common in games and stuff like that with continous involved user
> interaction rather than in webapps where it's a little more spaced out.
>
> If performance is *this* important to you, why don't you code your
> entire application in assembly hand crafting it for a certain processor,
> amount of memory and hard disk platter speed? Why use Python at all? The
> reason is because Python is "fast enough" for most things. You can get
> better performance moving to lower level routines but it's often not
> necessary and the costs it entails are usually not worth it. Better a
> fast enough stable app than a super fast one that occasionally segfaults
> and loses data.
>
> That's the point I'm trying to make.
>
>
> [...]
>
>
> --
> ~noufal
> http://nibrahim.net.in
>
> If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive! -- Samuel Goldwyn
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