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Birds, Classics, Etcetera
Blog Archive
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2008
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March
(19)
- This one's for Cheryl
- Where's Oppy?
- Earth Hour
- Great Scott, twenty years before Edison!
- Periwinkles
- You guys ...
- Alcatraz
- BH, continued
- Gas Pains
- Calverton Grasslands: Some publicity
- Fascinating books on Berkeley Heights
- More Chinese Brush Painting
- Two Emoticons for "Cat"
- Aamir
- I miss having 5 cats ....
- That's funny...
- Black and white restful ...
- It hasn't changed much (at least from the outside)
- Yipes! What did they see?
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March
(19)
3 comments:
I find it interesting that the Japanese culture should develop such a minimalist form of art yet have such a complex method for writing with all those word/concept pictures.
Programming always seemed to give me an insight into the workings of the minds of the programmers that had written the code I was working with. While there are large differences in the approaches to coding solutions with all folks, the Eastern programmers tend to be different in nature than that of the Western programmers.
Before I retired, I had on several occasions to work with the code of Chinese, Japanese, India and Pakistanian programmers - their approaches to code design were, generally, very complex and intricate. One time, we used some code from our sister school in Houston that had been written by an Indian fellow. It was almost a 20,000 line program. I had to reduce it, not in functionality, but in size to allow it to run faster. It took me almost a week to flowchart it in order to understand it and to start simplifying it. By the time I finished reworking it, it was just under 9,000 lines of code ...
I had an experience like that about 10 years ago. An applications program that ran on a hand held concole (no operating system). Two Japanese programmers had written it and the application was slow as molassas at 30 below! The program compiled to 930Kbytes. Over a 4 month period I added a lot of things that made the human interface much simplier, removed a bunch of dead code, and reorganized the storage and access of data. I also added a very simple self guided configuration sub program and help screens. When finished I had just over 400Kbytes of executable code and the thing had no discernable time lag when getting or entering data from the console.
My only guess as to how it got into its original condition was that they were pushed hard to meet deadlines and dinked with the code until it worked. They then went on to the next problem without cleaning up the code they had just worked on. I might add there were only a hand full of comments in the entire source code.
Interesting! I had no idea the code would be fuller when written by an Asian mind. I thought numbers were the universal language. Maybe it shows timidity, the bowing to whatever has been written before and fear of erasing it.
(P.S. this is an example of Chinese brush painting, but the principle is the same)
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