On Feb 26, 2004, at 12:49, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Timwi wrote:
Although I agree with Brion that someone should probably do some profiling, I see no harm in discussing improvements that may not turn out to be *major* improvements. I certainly do NOT agree that anything that is clearly on-topic and constructive, should be "forbidden" by anybody.
I agree with you, even though I also agreed with Brion. He was just joking, and so was I.
His point was that some discussions of optimizations really are premature until we spend some time working out just where bottlenecks actually are.
Working on performance improvements costs developer time, and that is a precious resource. If we spend all our time talking about things that might not help much, we are in fact decreasing the actual improvements we can make. (In economics this lovely concept is called opportunity cost; think of all the fun things you could have done in your life if you hadn't been sitting around in front of the computer! ;)
Sure, it's possible to put a lot of effort into something that yields very little improvement, but, y'know, why?
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)