[geeks] Upper Memory Limit - Java

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Feb 1, 2008, at 8:39 AM, Lionel Peterson wrote:

>> From: Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com>
>> Date: 2008/01/31 Thu PM 11:44:03 CST
>> To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>> Subject: Re: [geeks] Upper Memory Limit - Java
>
> <snip>
>
>> When I used to work with EDI files, they were all files of fixed
>> length records.
>>
>> Easy to parse, and very efficient to process.
>>
>> XML is hard to parse and highly inefficient.
>>
>> I love progress...
>
> But that is so '70s - kids these days don't understand why they  
> should use
> something so un-extensible ;^) As a side note, they also don't  
> understand who
> keeps buying those silly, out-dated mainframes - I mean seriously,  
> they are so
> huge (but you can run Linux on them ;^).
>
> I think it comes down to kids these days (and by kids I mean recent CS
> graduates) have literally no sense of scale - I think they spend all  
> of their
> time working on little tiny "scratch my personal itch" software  
> solutions and
> no class they take ever explains to them how to optimize software for
> literally millions and millions of iterations, communication over  
> anything
> other than an idle 100 Mb/sec ethernet connection, or meeting the  
> requirements
> of a varied user community (just their professor or TA).

You may be right.

Think of the difference between reading an XML record and reading a  
traditional fixed-field EDI file.

In XML you have literally hundreds of lines of code, more if written  
in C.  Even "tiny" XML is a large library of code to read and  
understand.

In the "outdated" format, you literally have a few memcpy() commands  
right from the read buffer, and that's it.

Your next step is conversion or direct use with no further overhead.

Even low end computers can read an EDI file at nearly spindle speeds.

XML... it can range from slightly painful to show stopping.

I'm not saying XML is bad, it has its place, but clearly it doesn't  
scale, and how on Earth people think of it as simple I'll never  
understand.

That brings up another thing: people seem to not understand the  
difference between sophistication and complication.

-- 
"Where some they sell their dreams for small desires."