sutton036

Computer science is coming full circle on performance. For decades, people worried intensely about performance and squeezed every ounce of speed they could from their code. But today the story is changing. The growing popularity of functional programming in the mainstream is encouraging people to think at a higher-level of abstraction. These people are often found reciting Knuth's famous quote "premature optimization is the root of all evil". Unfortunately the extremists among them are taking this too far and architecting systems with no regard for performance. The only fix is then tantamount to completely redesigning and reimplementing the entire system. We can only conclude that this extremist form of "premature optimization is the root of all evil" must be considered harmful. Joe Duffy of Microsoft already expressed a similar opinion .

As a technology company, we like to apply technical solutions to problems at all levels. Our board of directors even apply technical solutions to the problem of company direction. Business can be thought of as an optimization algorithm: tweaking stuff and things in order to maximize company profits. Interestingly, we use a number of different kinds of optimization algorithm when dictating the direction of the company. We begin new product lines based on experience but continue to optimize our products based on customer feedback, trying to solve the problems that are most important to our customers. For example, our F# for Numerics library started life as our second attempt at selling libraries to F# users (our first attempt was F# for Visualization ) and we provided the features we thought would be most useful. Customers inevitably requested more features including both technical features like parallel matrix inversion with arbitrary-precision rational arithmetic but also non-technica...