[Python-Dev] On the dangers of giving developers the best resources

[Tim Delaney]

On 9 October 2013 03:35, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 8:33 AM, R. David Murray <rdmurray at bitdance.com>wrote:
>
>> PS: I have always thought it sad that the ready availability of memory,
>> CPU speed, and disk space tends to result in lazy programs.  I understand
>> there is an effort/value tradeoff, and I make those tradeoffs myself
>> all the time...but it still makes me sad.  Then, again, in my early
>> programming days I spent a fair amount of time writing and using Forth,
>> and that probably colors my worldview. :)
>>
>
> I never used or cared for Forth, but I have the same worldview. I remember
> getting it from David Rosenthal, an early Sun reviewer. He stated that
> engineers should be given the smallest desktop computer available, not the
> largest, so they would feel their users' pain and optimize appropriately.
> Sadly software vendors who are also hardware vendors have incentives going
> in the opposite direction -- they want users to feel the pain so they'll
> buy a new device.
>

I look at it a different way. Developers should be given powerful machines
to speed up the development cycle (especially important when prototyping
and in the code/run unit test cycle), but everything should be tested on
the smallest machine available.

It's also a good idea for each developer to have a resource-constrained
machine for developer testing/profiling/etc. Virtual machines work quite
well for this - you can modify the resource constraints (CPU, memory, etc)
to simulate different scenarios.

I find that this tends to better promote the methodology of "make it right,
then make it fast (small, etc)", which I subscribe to. Optimising too early
leads to all your code being complicated, rather than just the bits that
need it.

Tim Delaney
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