Re: Cracking DES with C++ is faster than Java?

From: Paul Schlyter (pausch_at_saaf.se)
Date: 05/02/04 

Date: Sun, 02 May 2004 08:44:17 GMT

In article <tuYkc.60514$OU.1465692@news20.bellglobal.com>,
Paul Schmidt <wogsterca@yahoo.ca> wrote:
 
> Bryan Olson wrote:
>
>> Hey -- there are more important things to optimize than clock-
>> cycle counts. I too am old enough to have learned FORTRAN IV,
>> and let's not kid the kids: FORTRAN IV sucked! Wasting a few
>> machine cycles is one thing, but don't waste large amounts of my
>> time and claim to be doing me a favor.
>
> You need to look at conditions of the time though, you could hire a
> programmer for $5.00 an hour, computer time cost over $1000 per machine
> second, so if wasting 400 hours of programmer time saved 5 machine
> seconds you were ahead of the game.
 
Could you give an actual example of computer time costing over $1000
per machine second? That would amount to over $86 _million_ per day
or $31 _billion_ per year ---- quite a lucrative business for just
one single computer!!!! And even if the computer would be used by
paying customers only 10% of the time, it would still mean over $3
billion per year --- several decades ago when money was worth much
more than today!
 
Also, remember that the computers of the late 60's were, by today's
standards, quite slow. The amount of computation made during CPU
second on one of those machines could be duplicated by a human on a
mechanical calculator in less than 10 hours. And if a programmer
cost $5/hour, a human doing calculations could probably be obtained
for $2.5/hour. So why waste over $1000 on computer time when the
same amount of computations could be done by a human for less than
$25 ?????
 
 
> Today we look at different conditions, you can get a year of computer
> time for $1,000 but the programmer costs that for a week, so tools need
> to be programmer efficient rather then machine efficient. If you waste
> 5 hours of machine time and save a week of programmer time, your ahead
> of the game.
>
> Java becomes more programmer efficient by 2 of the 3Rs (reduce is the
> missing one) reuse and recycle, because a class is an independant
> entity, you can use the same class over and over again, in different
> programs.
 
There was software reuse before classes -- the subroutine was
invented for that specific purpose: to wrap code into a package
making it suitable for reuse in different programs.
 
Also: in real life, classes aren't as independent as you describe
here: most classes are dependent on other classes. And in extreme
examples, trying to extract a class from a particular program for use
in another program will force you to bring along a whole tree of
classes, which can make moving that class to the new program
infeasible.
 
> I think the future will be more descriptive, in that a program will
> describe what an object needs to accomplish rather then how the object
> does it. The compiler will then figure out how to do that.
 
Like Prolog ? It was considered "the future" in the 1980's .....
  

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Schlyter,  Grev Turegatan 40,  SE-114 38 Stockholm,  SWEDEN
e-mail:  pausch at stockholm dot bostream dot se
WWW:     http://www.stjarnhimlen.se/
         http://home.tiscali.se/pausch/

Relevant Pages