> What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for.
This is a great article, but there are many, many people for whom this advice is going to lead nowhere or worse. They have often been to fancy universities and have often earned fancy degrees. But what they don't realize is that they've also been trained to respond to the praise of authority figures. The article touches on this point later, but emphasizes a different outcome.
If there's one thing that authority figures absolutely hate is a project that makes you excessively curious.
I'll speculate that those most affected by this perverse reward system will deny its influence over them most strongly. They won't realize that their motivation for projects stems from the enthusiasm that authority figure show or withhold. They will therefore conclude that the warning above does not apply to them. And they will have a very hard time.
I saw this first-hand in graduate school. At least half the students had never learned to disregard the level of the greybeard's enthusiasm when choosing projects. Unsurprisingly, they also did not understood the process of formulating a project idea. This was the half that had, by far, the hardest time. At the slightest hint of graybeard apathy for a project idea, they were onto something else.
> So by violating the first rule of clean code — which is one of its central tenants — we are able to drop from 35 cycles per shape to 24 cycles per shape, impling that code following that rule number is 1.5x slower than code that doesn’t. To put that in in hardware terms, it would be like taking an iPhone 14 Pro Max and reducing it to an iPhone 11 Pro Max. It's three or four years of hardware evolution erased because somebody said to use polymorphism instead of switch statements.
The benchmark is a tight loop where the vtable lookup is a big chunk of the total computation. I don't think one can extrapolate this 1.5x improvement to real code. If anything, it represents an upper bound on the performance improvement you might expect to see.
I also didn't see anything about how the code was compiled. Various optimizations could affect performance in meaningful ways.
This is a great article, but there are many, many people for whom this advice is going to lead nowhere or worse. They have often been to fancy universities and have often earned fancy degrees. But what they don't realize is that they've also been trained to respond to the praise of authority figures. The article touches on this point later, but emphasizes a different outcome.
If there's one thing that authority figures absolutely hate is a project that makes you excessively curious.
I'll speculate that those most affected by this perverse reward system will deny its influence over them most strongly. They won't realize that their motivation for projects stems from the enthusiasm that authority figure show or withhold. They will therefore conclude that the warning above does not apply to them. And they will have a very hard time.
I saw this first-hand in graduate school. At least half the students had never learned to disregard the level of the greybeard's enthusiasm when choosing projects. Unsurprisingly, they also did not understood the process of formulating a project idea. This was the half that had, by far, the hardest time. At the slightest hint of graybeard apathy for a project idea, they were onto something else.