MC: Ping-Pong Cubes

[Maximilian Hohmann]

Hello!

(05-27-2018 04:48 PM)David Hayden Wrote:  In another case, we deliberately wrote a piece of thow-away code. The throw-away couldn't handle the rapidly growing load that we anticipated, but it could be written and deployed quickly. It gave us time to write a more robust implementation that could handle the load which increased four orders of magnitude.

Even more off-topic, but in my experience (from my code-writing-and-maintaining-and-extending-legacy-code days) "throw-away-code" is the worst of nightmares. Because in many cases it doesn't get thrown away - either because the team changes and no one seems to remember or because new challenges leave to time to clean up the old mess - but creeps onward and onward... In the end result a large software is built on top of a rotten foundation. Ask Volkswagen!

And back on topic: I personally do not have objections about brute force solutions to mathematical problems. These days computer time is a lot cheaper than developer time and if a job needs to be done on a limited budget (as it is always in engineering and the industrial environment) "elegance" of the solution is the least of worries.