Sunday, February 19, 2012

Sometimes you know they don't know what they are talking about

I got into an interesting exchange with one of our new developers this week. I was reviewing his korn shell code and noted that the method he used to split a string into two parts had a high overhead. (He was using awk instead of the korn shell built-in.) His response back was that he test out both methods using the 'time' command, and since both of his test times returned a time of 0.00, his method didn't have 'noticeable overhead'. This is when I knew this person simply doesn't know what he is doing or talking about. Both of his tests (his way and my way) were below the detection threshold of the 'time' command (10 milliseconds) so no reasonable information could be inferred from his results. (Taking the looping up 100 fold showed that my method had a 10 to 1 advantage in both clock time and CPU usage, took half the lines of code, and is more maintainable by other developers in our group because of the language.)