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Re: fastest way to find the first non-zero value in an array [message #59671]

Tue, 08 April 2008 07:02

Vince Hradil
Messages: 574
Registered: December 1999

Senior Member

On Apr 8, 8:34 am, David Fanning <n...@dfanning.com> wrote:
> Vince Hradil writes:
>> Wow - I'd be interested in knowing how slow 'where' is. Are we
>> talking the difference between 0.01 seconds and 0.05 seconds? Or even
>> the difference between 1 and 5 seconds? Time is money, but at what
>> point does our 'need for speed' end?
>
> I've gotten to the point where anything that takes less time
> than it takes to go get a cup of coffee is fast enough. I
> used to think fast, elegant programs were required. But
> when you are writing one-offs day after day, why bother?
> With Starbucks just across the street, I can afford to be
> a little loose with a FOR loop.
>
> Cheers,
>
> David
>
> P.S. That said, I just spent the entire weekend re-working
> a program I inherited from someone else. It is generally a
> good idea to write a program in such a way that someone else
> can get it to work in less time than it takes to write the
> darn thing from scratch. :-)
>
> --
> David Fanning, Ph.D.
> Fanning Software Consulting, Inc.
> Coyote's Guide to IDL Programming:http://www.dfanning.com/
> Sepore ma de ni thui. ("Perhaps thou speakest truth.")

Exactly - the google-mentality is making everyone think that 10
seconds is too long to wait for anything. But this makes sense to
me: it take about 2-4 hours for the scientist to acquire the data for
a certain experiment, it takes me about the same time to create the
one-off and run the analysis for said experiment. Sure I could spend
about 8 hours to tweak the analysis to make it run in 5 minutes
instead of half-an-hour, but why bother. Unless, of course we need
that extra half-hour? Then I end up writing some obfuscated code
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obfuscated_code) that uses histograms,
and the next developer that comes along just says, 'unh?' and re-
writes the whole thing.

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[Message index]

		Re: fastest way to find the first non-zero value in an array By: Vince Hradil on Tue, 08 April 2008 07:02
		Re: fastest way to find the first non-zero value in an array By: Spon on Tue, 08 April 2008 06:56
		Re: fastest way to find the first non-zero value in an array By: David Fanning on Tue, 08 April 2008 06:34
		Re: fastest way to find the first non-zero value in an array By: Vince Hradil on Tue, 08 April 2008 06:15
		Re: fastest way to find the first non-zero value in an array By: Spon on Tue, 08 April 2008 06:03
		Re: fastest way to find the first non-zero value in an array By: Clemens on Tue, 08 April 2008 01:42
		Re: fastest way to find the first non-zero value in an array By: karo03de on Wed, 09 April 2008 13:02

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