Newbie question about text encoding

[alister]

On Sat, 28 Feb 2015 03:12:16 +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 28, 2015 at 3:00 AM, alister
> <alister.nospam.ware at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>> I think there is a case for bringing back the overlay file, or at least
>> loading larger programs in sections only loading the routines as they
>> are required could speed up the start time of many large applications.
>> examples libre office, I rarely need the mail merge function, the word
>> count and may other features that could be added into the running
>> application on demand rather than all at once.
> 
> Downside of that is twofold: firstly the complexity that I already
> mentioned, and secondly you pay the startup cost on first usage. So you
> might get into the program a bit faster, but as soon as you go to any
> feature you didn't already hit this session, the program pauses for a
> bit and loads it. Sometimes startup cost is the best time to do this
> sort of thing.
> 
If the modules are small enough this may not be noticeable but yes I do 
accept there may be delays on first usage.

As to the complexity it has been my observation that as the memory 
footprint available to programmers has increase they have become less & 
less skilled at writing code.

of course my time as a professional programmer was over 20 years ago on 8 
bit micro controllers with 8k of ROM (eventually, original I only had 2k 
to play with) & 128 Bytes (yes bytes!) of RAM so I am very out of date.

I now play with python because it is so much less demanding of me which 
probably makes me just a guilty :-)

> Of course, there is an easy way to implement exactly what you're asking
> for: use separate programs for everything, instead of expecting a
> megantic office suite[1] to do everything for you. Just get yourself a
> nice simple text editor, then invoke other programs - maybe from a
> terminal, or maybe from within the editor - to do the rest of the work.
> A simple disk cache will mean that previously-used programs start up
> quickly.
Libre office was sighted as just one example
Video editing suites are another that could be used as an example 
(perhaps more so, does the rendering engine need to be loaded until you 
start generating the output? a small delay here would be insignificant)
> 
> ChrisA
> 
> [1] It's slightly less bloated than the gigantic office suite sold by a
> top-end software company.





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