23-May-2006

TrickyDicky in Zenit Translations posts an article, Merck's warning, a Translation of El aviso de Merck, a leader published in La Vanguardia Digital on 23-May-2006. This is a call to the central and local governments by the newspaper to improve the political climate for research and development in the country in general and in Catalonia in particular so that more companies, like the pharmaceutical giant Merck, will establish laboratories here and so generate employment for local people and wealth for the nation.

Premature optimisation

gallir in Ricardo Galli, de software libre warns against premature optimisation, not just for performance of an application, but also in design. He reminds us of a quote by C. A. Hoare in Knuth's book, Literate Programming (Stanford, California: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 1992), "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil." He also translates into Spanish a section in the article, Aerith: Java, not Ajax:

“It's impossible to think through what people are going to want to do until they start doing it, so sometimes it's best to seed the market with a hack that gets people going, and then follow up as you watch what they do with it.”

Paul Graham says more or less the same in The hardest lessons for startups to learn.

gallir then goes on to say in his own style of cryptic criticism,

“If some bloggers read and thought about what they wrote in their blogs in addition to cutting and pasting text PAUSE they would realise that they were shooting their own foot STOP But to think and to be coherent at the same time is asking too much STOP I was going to paraphrase Sabina PAUSE but as I am a little more polite I will only say that the evidence shows that to write a blog that is visited by many people you don't need to have a lot of brains STOP The existence of this blog is one more example FULL STOP.”