Database in a simple ascii file

[Peter Hansen]

Cameron Laird wrote:
> 
> Peter Hansen  <peter at engcorp.com> wrote:
[...]
> >Why focus on performance when you have no idea how fast
> >you want your program to be?  Recent advances in software
> >development are teaching programmers *never* to optimize
> >until the program works, and only when there is a clear
> >requirement for more performance.
> >
> >If you are really concerned about performance, you will
> >always be able to get more than a 10 times speedup by
> >switching to a compiled language over Python.  Use of
> >Python should imply you are more interested in readability
> >and ease of use, and thus speed of *development*, over
> >speed of execution.
> >
> >(Shorter answer: don't grow any grey hairs over it.)
>                         .
>                         .
>                         .
> Peter and I agree on so many large conclusions,
> and differ on so many details.

Would that I had avoided details, and just left it at
my first paragraph above! :)  I was hoping merely to 
dissuade another relatively inexperienced programmer
from wasting too much of his life worrying excessively
about performance issues.

> My own suspicion about the situation the original
> poster describes is that I/O time dominates, and
> that neither "switching to a compiled language" nor
> a fancier persistence method will help by even a
> factor of two (maybe not 10%) in comparison with
> judiciously straightforward Python coding.  

You are almost certainly quite right.  Yet another 
reason to avoid worrying about it ...

-- 
----------------------
Peter Hansen, P.Eng.
peter at engcorp.com