I first saw this joke back in the days of 8-bit home microcomputers. Of course then it only needed 256 lines of code, and took up about 8k of your precious, precious RAM.
Looks through the algorithm bits in the various sections. How would you implement that? The answer is invariably by copying the highly nested statements of the spec directly into your language. Maybe there’s a better way, but you’d have to understand all that nested logic first, and you’d be exhausted at that point and just want to move on.
I think he was being sarcastic, playing with words. Meaning, that you trade in time, runtime and memory and get nothing in return :D so a pretty bad trade haha.
Of course it’s worse, I mean, that was the point of this blogpost, wasn’t it? :p It’s just a (long) joke.
As a side note, the program is amazingly performant. For small numbers the results are instantaneous and for the large number close to the 2^32 limit the result is still returned in around 10 seconds.
For a long time I’ve been of the opinion that you should only ever optimize for the next sucker colleague who might need to read and edit your code. If you ever optimize for speed, it needs to be done with massive benchmarking / profiling support to ensure that the changes you make are worth it. This is especially true with modern compilers / interpreters that try to use clever techniques to optimize your code either on the fly, or before making the executable.
I do feel like it’s good, though, when libraries optimize. Ideally, they don’t have much else to do than one thing really well anyways.
And with how many libraries modern applications pull in, you do eventually notice whether you’re in the Python ecosystem, where most libraries don’t care, or in the Rust ecosystem, where many libraries definitely overdo it. Because well, they also kind of don’t overdo it, since as a user of the library, you don’t see any of it, except the culmulative performance benefits.
Libraries are also written and maintained by humans.
It’s fine to optimize if you can truly justify it, but that’s going to be even harder in libraries that are going to be used on multiple different architectures, etc.
I’m still mad he didn’t use the size of the number to tell the system which block to read first. I feel like that would be a great use of division or maybe modulus?
The problem with if is the answer comes from user. There’s no mathematical reason or scientific explanation, only programmer who thinks the answer should include the subject.
But even on a more metaphorical level, every single thing that has or will happen in this universe, down to even the smallest quantum fluctuations could be encapsulated into IF statements as long as you had enough of them.
Could be easily made 50% space saving by only iffin all odds and return even on else. Maybe one if before to handle overflow to avoid wrong even if over the last if.
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