Hand coding of routines

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Nov 28, 2005 at 06:11:27PM -0500, phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org wrote:
> This is an article my colleague Augustine Lee sent to me. I thought the
> TLUGers might find it interesting.
> 
> ---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
> Subject: You'll love to read this article
> From:    "Augustine Lee" <auglee-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org>
> Date:    Mon, November 28, 2005 10:03 am
> To:      "Peter Hiscocks" <phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> I know you'll love to read this article, if for no other reason than:
> 
> 1. It is about writing code by hand, our old fashion way, that produced
> the fastest code possible

Well at least in this case figuring out what is the biggest performance
problem of a given CPU and write the algorithm to minimize the hit of
that bottleneck.  It is certainly very specialized code for a very
specific problem.

> 2. That the person 's name is Mr. Goto (sounds familiar?)

Fairly common japanese last name as far as I can tell.  It seems to pop
up frequently enough in various places.

> 3. Yet another person whose previous job was in the patent office
> (sounds familiar?)

Can't think of anything here.  Nope nothing familiar pops to mind.

> 4. That Mr. Goto has no formal computer training or software design
>         "he perfected his craft by learning from programmers on an Internet
>         mailing list focusing on the Linux operating system for the
> Alpha chip"

If he did work with alphas then he must have worked in the computer
world a while, and you don't have to go that far back before there was
no formal training.  Math and physics and engineering people just worked
on it and figured things out as they went.  After all someone had to
invent/design the computers in the first place and figure out how to use
them efficiently.

Lennart Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml