Re: BGP peering strategies for smaller routers

[William Herrin <bill () herrin us>]

On Tue, May 3, 2016 at 6:18 PM, Nick Hilliard <nick () foobar org> wrote:
> William Herrin wrote:
> > And it is poor code quality. Even slicing and dicing the ram in odd
> > ways, there's just no excuse for an order-of-magnitude increase in ram
> > required to run the same algorithms on the same data.
>
> If RAM were expensive, your argument would make sense, but RAM is not
> expensive.

Hi Nick,

You missed the point. Sloppy memory management is a "canary in a coal
mine." It's a user-visible symptom that reflects poor code quality
underneath. Programmers who don't care how much ram they're consuming
are the same fools who catch and then ignore exceptions, don't bother
evaluating the big-oh running time of their algorithms (often have no
idea what that is) and engage in a variety of other bad practices that
you as the customer suffer for but never directly see.

It's not the cost of the ram, it's the attitude that ram is cheap so I
won't care. It's a bad attitude, a dangerous attitude when found in a
computer programmer. One which consistently leads to failure.

If you challenge poor code quality when you spot it, your vendor might
correct course. If you let it slide then by the time the code base is
damaged enough for the pointy-hairs to understand there's a problem on
their own, your only real choice will be to switch to a different
product or vendor.

> Can we move on now?

Sure, why not. I've proselytized enough for one day.

Regards,
Bill Herrin




-- 
William Herrin ................ herrin () dirtside com  bill () herrin us
Owner, Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>