Software Drag Racing

For some reason some people keep getting their knickers in a knot over Tim Bray’s Wide Finder fun:

There is a steady drumbeat of commentary along the lines of “WTF? This is a trivial I/O-bound hack you could do on the command line, ridiculously inappropriate for investigating issues of parallelism.” To which I say “Horseshit”. It’s an extremely mainstream, boring, unglamorous file-processing batch job.

To that I say “Horseshit”. Wide Finder is software drag racing at its finest: how fast can your code go this far? “Mainstream and boring” – that’s like telling a funny car racer their job is mainstream and boring because they just drive straight and then stop.

Take a look at some of the code being produced. Things of beauty they are, going from 1:43.71 for Tim’s first Ruby version to 1.51 seconds for the current perl leader.

“Ridiculously inappropriate” Who cares? Software development could use more fun and games like this.