Re: My take on ARC

From: Doug Tolton (doug_at_nospam.com)
Date: 10/20/03 

Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2003 21:55:10 GMT

Erann Gat wrote:

> In article <BbXkb.3303344$Bf5.452911@news.easynews.com>, Doug Tolton
> <doug@nospam.com> wrote:
>
>
>>>One of the premises of ARC's design is that speed doesn't matter because
>>>today's machines are so fast. I don't accept this premise. Speed only
>>>doesn't matter if you're not doing production work. If you're doing
>>>production work speed does matter because as soon as you start to process
>>>in volume your machine costs are directly proportional to your speed. If
>>>you can process customer requests twice as fast you only need half as many
>>>machines.
>>
>>Sorry, I very much disagree with this perspective. I do a *great*
>>amount of production work, and very few problems require more machine
>>speed. The largest cost of owning a machine and solving most business
>>problems do not relate to machine speed, they are directly tied to
>>programmer or operator productivity.
>
>
> I think this depends on what kind of business you're in. In a marginal
> business, like most Internet businesses are nowadays, this is probably
> true. But once you start to achieve real success on the scale of a Google
> or an Ebay then speed starts to matter more. Speed increases of a factor
> of 2 can translate into annual savings running into many millions of
> dollars. Even by Google's standards that's real money.
>
I'll concede this. I do think Optimization is important, sometimes
though I think it is over emphasized. In all honesty the reason I like
Lisp over say Python is because I have the best of both worlds.
Unbelievable development environment coupled with blazingly fast
natively compiled code.

I think that's part of why he is striving for minimalism though, in
order to make re-implementation on different platforms / hardware
easier. Although this is pure speculation on my part.
>
>
>>Processing a customer request is almost always directly proportional to
>>the amount of time it takes for the operator or programmer to do their
>>task.
>
>
> Only if there's a human in the loop.
>
Very true. This consideration is far less important for something like
a web site.
>
>>>Yes, hardware is cheap, but the cost of the hardware is only a
>>>tiny fraction of the TCO of a machine. You have to find a place to put
>>>it, pay for the air conditioning, pay a sysadmin to maintain it and
>>>replace it every two years or so.
>>
>>If this is true, why don't you write everything in Assembly? Because it
>>will take 50 times as long to get it done.
>
>
> At some point in any optimization process you reach a point of diminishing
> returns. But that does not mean that efficiency is irrelevant. Certainly
> developer time matters also. But it's not the only thing that matters.
>
Agreed
>
>>I'm sorry, I just disagree with this conclusion. As time advances
>>machine time is becoming less and less of a factor.
>
>
> Then why does Google's server farm keep growing instead of shrinking?
>
I don't know enough of Google's internals to comment on this. Since you
worked there, I'd assume you are in a better position than me to answer
this question. If I were to hazard a guess though, it would be that
they are doing more with their farm. 

-- 
Doug Tolton
(format t "~a@~a~a.~a" "dtolton" "ya" "hoo" "com")

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