Programmer Humor

On further inspection, it was found that the mathematician had assumed an ideal sphere of constant radius, while the real object was in fact oblate. The mathematician had neglected to take any measurements, leading to an incorrect value. The physicist's answer was correct, but only at sea level at nominal temperature.

The engineer is currently using calipers to measure the diameter of the object at many different angles in order to build a CAD model. He said we could expect results next year.

They later added an Anthropologist, who understood that more questions needed to be asked. His first question was "do you want fries with that?"

Reminds me of the first time I saw Sin and Cos lookup tables being used in early 3D gaming. The computers could calculate those just fine, especially with a math co-processor. But for 3D gaming it would be too slow to get a good framerate. So lookup tables were used to greatly improve the speed.

Back on those days all sort of neat tricks like that would be used. Often done as little demo programs that were very impressive. Before the internet it was hard to look up something like that and the latest and greatest tricks weren't written in books yet. So often little code snippets and demo programs would be shared amongst programmers using the sneakernet, so we could all learn and get better.

Ah my prior manager suggested something similar... Dynamic views that would adjust based on user set parameters... We set up canned views and called it a day.

He was let go, but always pushed for the art of the possible (even if it would take a few extra sprints to wrap)

It's possible that the dynamic generation might be more maintainable than a lookup list, though.

With a lookup list, you may need to recalculate the whole thing every time you make a small change. And a significant change, like giving the user a new choice/parameter to adjust, may not only require recalculating the lookup table, but also exponentially increasing the size of the lookup table.

Whereas with a dynamically generated result, small adjustments to the values likely wouldn't require any modification of the actual code at all, and adding a new choice/parameter would be fairly straightforward -- it just needs to be plugged into the formula, maybe add an extra step or two in the algorithm.

Yeah, software engineers are the sanitation engineers of programming. Source: am one

I think it means when the method is barely better O(Exp), even on ordered sets

Depends on the available memory and size of the tables. I've worked on cases where time to compute didn't matter as much as shaving off three more bytes did. Large lookup tables would have absolutely killed us compared to running some math.

IIRC, Elite used lookup tables for trigonometric functions on certain target platforms (maybe the NES) because memory wasn't as much of a constraint as computing performance. It's a barrel of game compressed into a pint of code.

Alright to anyone who would question this statement. I am a mom, and have had extremely similar conversations with my kid regarding programming and perspectives.

Seriously it's important for problem solving to not get caught up in perfect solutions or solutions you think are the right path be cause of your own bias'.

Sometimes to solve a problem you are stuck on, or is proving too challenging the best course of action is to figure out why you are trying to solve it that way, and what other solutions there might be.

When I was a kid and my mother was teaching me to read SQL

Why would a mother do this, I'm horrified

And then there's good old Chris Sawyer, writing an entire (fairly complex) game completely in Assembly, because he wanted the (actually kind of computationally heavy) game to still work on potato hardware.