[rbanffy]

> it's not clear what exactly your complaint is.

Any complexity introduced in the code increases its long term maintenance cost. I strongly suspect this is one of those cases where the performance gain will not justify the long-term effort of maintaining a more complex architecture.

I remember having a similar discussion circa 1992 about advantages and disadvantages of using ODBC versus native MS SQL/Sybase libraries. I instrumented the program I was writing and showed it spent 99+% of the time idling, 1-% of the time computing and, of that time, about 78% waiting for the database to return something. Using native libraries would yield a minuscule improvement at the cost of a huge headache.

[zedshaw]

So, you're comparing my track record with writing simple maintainable well documented code to something you did in 1992 with ODBC? That's your experience that's causing all the paranoia?

The worst two things that afflict programmers today is:

1. They never update their information, even after 18 years (18! You realize that right!? Things change man!)

2. They have an irrational paranoia about trying new things, as if me trying this out is going to destroy the universe.

That really needs to change.

[rbanffy]

1) Will you maintain Mongrel forever? It's not your track record that's the question, but the one of all future maintainers of Mongrel that will have to deal with the added complexity this change creates.

2) The experience from 1992 still seems current. Adding complexity to any software project adds cost to maintain it in the future. My experience in 1992 showed how added complexity for a marginal performance gain did not pay off then and still won't pay off today (unless you are programming a computer so expensive even a marginal increase in performance means lots of money).

3) It's your project and you may do with it whatever pleases you. What I wrote was intended as friendly advice from someone who is in this business for a long time. You are, of course, free not to accept the advice.

4) I encourage you to try new things and I am usually the first to propose workload-adaptable solutions. I, however, had my share of extremely clever optimizations that bit me back later when things as subtle as processor caches changed and it's not very funny (albeit it is fun to dig deep in the system to find out why X runs 33% slower on the 50% faster box). Nowadays, I consider every program line not written a line gained.

[pmjordan]

Will you maintain Mongrel forever?

With all due respect, this seems a ridiculous question. Do you obtain written statements to the above effect from all maintainers of software (open source or otherwise) before using it? Yes, it'll have to be maintained, but Zed's article alone is more documentation than you could ever hope for from most programmers. It's clear he isn't "most programmers" but that's no reason to hold him to ridiculous standards.

[rbanffy]

I am not holding him to ridiculous standards. It's obvious he won't maintain Mongrel forever. What I am confronting him is with the fact that he may be able to navigate any arbitrarily clever construct he invents, but that future maintainers who inherit Mongrel may not be as capable.

Again, it's his project and he's free to do whatever he feels like with it. Heck... I am not even a user. I offered him advice he is free to disregard. The fact my cleverness has been biting me ever since my 6502 days (quite likely before Zed was born) is a problem I sort of learned to deal with long ago - but it still comes to bite me from time to time.

[pmjordan]

While we're at it, let's lobby our governments to ban all software innovation!

Seriously, I bet the operating system you're using relies on far more of that evil "cleverness" than the subject of this thread.

This whole thread reeks of thinly veiled ad hominem attacks to me.

[rbanffy]

Zed tends to do the ad-hominem part very well without any need for external help. And you are using a straw-man. I never came even close to advocate for banning all software innovation.

What I said, and repeat, is that if you want to introduce an expensive to maintain piece of code, you have to weight the added cost against the performance gain. In this case, the performance gain seems marginal, the assumption of usage envisioned seems wrong and the added complexity seems just pointless.

It's his project, his code and I am not even a Mongrel user. I offer this as a friendly piece of advice, from old programmer to young programmer.

You know: it doesn't matter if you are beam-racing a 6502 or writing networking code to run on 64-bit deeply pipelined processors, there are things that remain true. This is one of them.