What's your favorite year end method?

[Donald Allen]

On Dec 26, 2007 7:00 AM, Keith A. Milner <kamilner at superlative.org> wrote:
> 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.

This is a general discussion, setting out the views of various people
who might conceivably be involved in dealing with the reports issue. I
don't think any specific solutions have been 'pushed'. That will
inevitably come after this discussion reaches its natural conclusion
(no one has anything more to add). I think the discussion has been
healthy and collegial (very important), and having it occur on this
group, rather than, say, gnucash-devel, draws in the views of a
diverse set of people (you contributed some good thoughts above that
add to the discussion), many of the people who will be the ultimate
consumers of whatever is done about the reports.

/Don

>
> Cheers,
>
> --
> Keith A. Milner
>
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