[ExI] Weird new way to do physics

[Kelly Anderson]

Hi Everyone!

  Again, sorry for the late reply to this thread... but on the subject
of picking a programming language and premature optimization, let me
share my personal observations of a little local company known as
WordPerfect. Back in the good old days around 1988, there was just one
really good word processor, and it was WordPerfect. It was written
entirely in assembly, and ran amazingly fast in 640K of memory, which
was all that was available to most people back in those good old days.
One day, a greasy little kid from Washington came up with this snazzy
new thing called Microsoft Windows. This enabled computers to use more
than 640K of memory, and many of the advantages of writing in
assembler went away... but the good folks at WordPerfect continued
their belief that only assembly was good enough for their program. And
they had quite a bit of trouble getting assembly to work right in this
new Windows world.

  Meanwhile, the greasy kid from Washington could not talk the
WordPerfect people into supporting his newfangled Windows program,
because they were too busy cooperating with IBM in producing a word
processor for the "obviously superior in every technical way" OS/2...
and the story started that Windows would be an also ran, and they
didn't immediatly port WordPerfect to Windows. And when they did, they
discovered it to be difficult. Very difficult. Partially because they
were still writing in assembler. Never mind now that WordPerfect ran
on something like 29 platforms already... So anyway, the kid from
Washington had to write his own word processor for Windows, and Word
was foisted upon the world.

  Fast forward to 2011, and Novel's grand scheme of buying WordPerfect
boils down to suing the greasy little kid from Washington, who is now
retired, for a couple of billion dollars. Even worse, they interrupted
his giving away his billions for a couple of days and dragged him to a
Utah court room. And even if they win, that will be the end of
WordPerfect.

  While there are many morals to this story, one moral is that picking
the most optimal programming language is usually the least of your
problems. Smart kids from another place are usually a bigger problem.

-Kelly