Premature optimization (was Re: Structures

On Sat, 29 Mar 2008 22:15:52 -0400, Ken Tilton wrote:

Nice speech, bad assumption: what makes you think I was going to supply
the value nil along with the :conc-name option? Or did I guess wrong at
the point you were making? You never quite made it explicit, but it
sounded as if you were concerned about name clashes.

Allow me to abbreviate the confusion:

(defstruct (newsgroup (:conc-name ng-))
name address messages)

I thought in that case I may as well just make the structure names short
as define the :conc-name. It's not really that big a deal. I just
mentioned it as one downside of using structs vs objects.

Optimization
************

A few people have mentioned premature optimization. This is something I
have to fight against, having grown up in a world where CPU time cost over
$1.50 per second and disk space was $30/mb/month. I just don't yet have a
good sense of what is going to get me in trouble later and what is not.

Last month I spent two days restructuring my code so it would be easy to
split it into multiple threads (using SBCL threads). I felt if I left it
until later I would have more code to fix up later on. Still not sure that
was a good investment at that stage.

How do other people manage these dilemmas?

Tim
.