Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Some of today’s more efficient technologies are efficient because we are lazy.

FORTRAN is an efficient programming language. The executable files are small. The programs execute quickly. There is a simple reasons why FORTRAN is an efficient programming language: the compilers were created at a time when computing resources were much less than they are today.

We should update the compilers to take advantage of today’s more abundant computing resources. We, however, don’t update them. We have more important things to do with our time. Well, maybe it’s just because we have things to do that we like more than updating old compilers.

This is also known as being lazy.

That is a bit more blunt than, “we have limited personnel expertise and have based allocation of resources on return on investment analysis,” but is also a bit more closer to the truth.