Strangely Consistent

It seems like it is very simple to me: You should always code with your performance requirements in mind. But you shouldn't do detailed optimization until you have some sort of profiling feedback.

You have to do your basic coding with your performance requirements in mind, because it is all too easy to come up with code that can never meet your performance requirements, no matter how much you profile and optimize it.

Case in point: http://strangelyconsistent.org/blog/p1-best-way-to-multiply-a-chain-of-matrices . My solution (http://strangelyconsistent.org/p6cc2010/p1-colomon/) was quite elegant, IMO, setting up things so I simply generated all the all the possible solutions, and then took the min with respect to the number of multiplications.

But it was also appallingly inefficient. Generating all the possible solutions is completely the wrong approach, and no amount of optimizations to my algorithm would ever be sufficiently efficient for non-trivial problems. The only possible approach is to start over from scratch: http://strangelyconsistent.org/p6cc2010/p1-moritz/

So if I had properly considering my performance requirements, I would have come up with a much better solution. (Or just failed: dynamic programming is not really in my programming toolbox. I need to get around to remedying that!) But at the same time, worrying about how to most efficiently represent my Ordering object would have been completely pointless.

That's what "avoid premature optimization"…

The old FOSS model is not compatible with the kind of people who are being drawn into it these days. It worked decently with thick-skinned, more-or-less autistic men who communicated relatively infrequently over email and had an understanding that they weren't beholden to anybody.

I don't think it worked as well in the good old days as you think.

A lot of Perl's problems can be attributed to one of those old men, Tom Christensen. He combined technical brilliance with a flair for flaming, and was at the center of why p5p (perl 5 porters) became a hostile flame-fest. With the result that the 5.6.x series was a complete disaster. And the problems were so bad that as http://strangelyconsistent.org/blog/happy-10th-anniversary-perl-6 describes, in 2000 Jon Orwant (editor of The Perl Journal) brought attention to it by smashing mugs against a wall.

The current spat is much less dramatic than that one was. You just know about it because it is current.

People claim that Perl's problems began with Perl 6. But in fact Perl 6 was one piece of Larry Wall's solution to a rather urgent problem. And that problem was how to separate people who wanted to create new features from people who wanted absolute backwards compatibility. Like Tom Christensen. (Who Larry Wall also told to calm down.) And ideas from Perl 6 also made their way back to Perl 5 in various ways. Yes, it became a branding problem. But if it didn't happen, Perl was set to implode on itself much more…

I think you're refering to the owner of the site, but here's for the hacker news crowd:

Submitted solutions
http://strangelyconsistent.org/p6cc2011/

Problem description
http://strangelyconsistent.org/blog/the-2011-perl-6-coding-contest