What's your favorite year end method?

[Keith A. Milner]

On Tuesday 25 December 2007 16:22:40 Donald Allen wrote:

> I don't agree. Good programmers know that "clean" code is necessary
> but not sufficient, and they know that good algorithms are the big
> hammer of performance, not micro-second-shaving tricks. And the right
> programming environment will make it easier to avoid the kind of
> algorithmic issues that you are describing in some of the gnucash
> reports. You use the word "esoteric" to describe hash tables. Yes,
> perhaps, if you have to roll your own. But a good environment will
> give you nice, easy-to-use hash tables (e.g., MIT Scheme, Python; even
> Tcl has them), hiding the "esoteric" stuff. I used Python hash tables
> (dictionaries) at the core of my report utility, and I'm quite sure
> the program would have been uselessly slow (as some of the gnucash
> reports are) had I used some other structure, e.g., lists, that
> involved significant searching. And it was trivial to do.

I agree with Dale's post that we are getting too far into a debate about the 
relative capabilities of different programming languages. 

I think this is a good debate to have, but may I suggest we stand back and 
look at the requirements before we start pushing specific solutions.

From my point of view, I think it would be nice if we could give much more 
control to the end-user without resorting to programming languages at all. Of 
course this is easier said than done, but it might be worth seeing what's 
available in other, similar, systems and borrowing some of the better ideas.

Of course more advanced reports will always require some programming.

Another thing I would also suggest is to avoid anything too Gnome-centric. An 
awful lot of people use KDE and other desktops and, although most of the core 
Gnome libs can be installed and used, there may be some facilities which 
simply may not work too well unless used within the Gnome environment.

Cheers,

-- 
Keith A. Milner