Friday, November 12, 2010

How not to write scripts

Today, I've seen a PHP script that used 41.5 Gb of virtual memory. 26 of them were carefully put to the swap. And I recalled the programs we were writing only 15-20 years ago. Like, a text editor that could process gigabyte text files (in theory, because there were no disk drives to store such files). Or a graphic viewer that could show pictures ten times larger than the amount of available RAM.

As a friend of mine has put it, in the USSR, when the engineers were sent to kolkhoz to gather in the crop of potato, they knew what might happen to them if they didn't work well. Wish some of modern developers knew that, too.

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