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Programming Perls

Programming Perls programming by Jon L. Bentl~ pear s broken. W h e n they arrived at the test site, they immediately saw the design flaw: the box that held the quarters was far too small, and the machine was literally stuffed with money. System builders often allocate fixed resources that are too small. The history of maxi-, mini-, and microcomputers shows this three times in selecting the n u m b e r of bits in the address space; the 12 bits in original machines were quickly outgrown and replaced by 16, 24, and currently 32 bits. Machines that provided virtual address spaces and could easily expand their real address spaces were typically more successful. I once wrote a program in which users could define "gizmos." W h e n first asked, users said that one or two gizmos should suffice. I argued them up to saying that they might need five, and then put 50 in the first ver,sion of the program. The first production run used 45 gizmos. The single moral of these three anecdotes is Allocate fixed resources generously to begin with, and make them easy to expand. ABOUT THE COLUMN Peter Denning described this column http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Communications of the ACM Association for Computing Machinery

Programming Perls

Bentley, Jon L.
Communications of the ACM , Volume 27 (1) – Jan 1, 1984
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Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Copyright
Copyright © 1984 by ACM Inc.
ISSN
0001-0782
DOI
10.1145/69605.993447
Publisher site
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Abstract

programming by Jon L. Bentl~ pear s broken. W h e n they arrived at the test site, they immediately saw the design flaw: the box that held the quarters was far too small, and the machine was literally stuffed with money. System builders often allocate fixed resources that are too small. The history of maxi-, mini-, and microcomputers shows this three times in selecting the n u m b e r of bits in the address space; the 12 bits in original machines were quickly outgrown and replaced by 16, 24, and currently 32 bits. Machines that provided virtual address spaces and could easily expand their real address spaces were typically more successful. I once wrote a program in which users could define "gizmos." W h e n first asked, users said that one or two gizmos should suffice. I argued them up to saying that they might need five, and then put 50 in the first ver,sion of the program. The first production run used 45 gizmos. The single moral of these three anecdotes is Allocate fixed resources generously to begin with, and make them easy to expand. ABOUT THE COLUMN Peter Denning described this column

Journal

Communications of the ACM – Association for Computing Machinery

Published: Jan 1, 1984

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