This I used to believe

Question

Possible Duplicate:
What is your longest-held programming assumption that turned out to be incorrect?

What did you once believe (that is topical for SO) that you no longer do?

Why did you change your mind?

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Me: I grew up on C. I thought that pointers – and custom management of assignment sizes and so forth (saving a few bytes here and there) – was important, and scripting or interpreted languages (eg Java) were inefficient because they hid this.

Man, was I wrong (in practical terms). In real life (working on production systems with tens of millions of users), this has been totally insignificant compared to the real speed and memory bottlenecks (bad SQL, network i/o, race conditions, caching, etc); language level stuff has essentially never been worth any sacrifice.

Not having to deal with that level of stuff any more makes my coding much more enjoyable, since I get to write much more stuff I want to happen and much less how it runs.

IOW, high level programming is good.

Caveat: This applies only to systems where you have the luxury of modern processors and RAM sizes. Operating on e.g. an old Palm Pilot with a Dragonball Z processor, one starts running more into processing constraints. Sorry to all the embedded systems programmers out there. ;)

Answer 1

I used to believe that it was all about technology and being up on the latest stuff. (You know, understanding the Apple ][ inside and out, 6502 assembly language, etc.)

I now believe that people are involved. They are an important part of the picture, and often part of the challenge. What changed my mind? A series of encounters with people.

Answer 2

I remember learning recursion and thinking that every problem could and should be solved recursively. A short time later I learned about performance and stack overflow problems. Even later I learned of tail recursion and found peace again.

Answer 3

I used to believe that no one has ever written code more impressive than Wozniak's code that drove the Apple floppy drive.

Wait, I still believe that.

Answer 4

I used to try to write everything on my own for web development, but now I try to rely on libraries whenever possible. Basically I stopped programming things that have been done, and better than I can ever do.