Funny but true, many people think computers are "smart". When I am confronted with this statement in the general public I always remind them: "Computers are fast, at well computing, humans not so much. Computers however are stupid, they follow my directions exactly as I give them and will keep doing the same stupid thing until I figure out my mistake."
When we have a computer that can read the original post and give estimates and comment here on HN I will be impressed. Until then it's just a faster z80 to me, amazing, don't get me wrong, the things we can do today with the power at our disposal starts to feel like magic. [1]
All that said it makes me sad when I find code that someone didn't bother to think through or even use the profiling tools available to maximize the amount of resources it's consuming. It's true that "premature optimization is the root of all evil"[2] however at some point it can be worth you time to review your assumptions and crappy code and give it a tune up.[3]
When we have a computer that can read the original post and give estimates and comment here on HN I will be impressed. Until then it's just a faster z80 to me, amazing, don't get me wrong, the things we can do today with the power at our disposal starts to feel like magic. [1]
All that said it makes me sad when I find code that someone didn't bother to think through or even use the profiling tools available to maximize the amount of resources it's consuming. It's true that "premature optimization is the root of all evil"[2] however at some point it can be worth you time to review your assumptions and crappy code and give it a tune up.[3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws [2] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth [3] http://ubiquity.acm.org/article.cfm?id=1513451