Monday, March 28, 2011

[ghtpijgs] Computers should be instantaneous

Computers should be instantaneous for most interactions.  If it's not instantaneous, yer doin' it wrong.

Computers execute millions of operations in a blink of an eye, so in the space of all computations, most computations should either be way less than that, or way more than that (for exponential growth problems).  It should be very surprising to encounter a computation that is long enough for a human to notice, but shorter than the age of the universe.

But we see this all the time especially in bloated, sluggish UIs.  Something is wrong.

(The exception is tasks which have been tuned of arbitrary difficulty, but tuned to take a bearable amount of time.)

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