What's your favorite year end method?

[Derek Atkins]

Quoting Donald Allen <donaldcallen at gmail.com>:

> All true. But I'm assuming that there will be some screening process,
> perhaps embodied in people like Derek and Josh, that will insure that
> only the work of people who know what they are doing will make it into
> the SVN repository (perhaps this wasn't always true, having just read
> Derek's comment that some of the reports are O(n^3) in the number of
> transactions, but I'm guessing that this will not be an issue, given
> the quality of the current lead developers). So if we assume good
> programmers, then the issue boils down to not impeding them with
> second-rate tools.

I'm afraid to admit that the O(n^3) algorithms were introduced
under our watch.  They were added in the 2.0 release.  I'd have
to go look at who submitted the code.  But even clean code can have
a stupid algorithm.

In fact I would argue that clean code tends to LEND itself to doing
things stupidly.  It just makes more sense to perform the types of
comparisons that lead you to O(n^3) algorithms than using esoteric
data structures like hash tables and such to store itinerant data
in the middle of your processing.

So, while you can expect Josh and I to make sure the code is relatively
easy to read, you can't expect us to scrutinize every report to make
sure the algorithms used are optimal.  We tend to only look for correctnes
;)   And the current reports (generally) are correct, if not optimal.

Also, if the language choice is python you lose me as another set of
eyes.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available