Stupidly Obscure Programming in a Troubled Time

Since obsessively underlining passages in a tattered copy of Goodbye to Berlin hasn't proven to be the uplifting diversion I was hoping for, I resolved to bash my head against some really complicated scala code that I'm not qualified to write and that nobody is asking for either.

So that this exercise in self-abuse could pass for a reasonable use of my time - but not too reasonable, since that would be a giveaway - I decided to link it to an existing, longstanding obsession of mine: paradigms and constructs for concurrency.

Warning of what's …

Donald Knuth famously opined:

“The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.”

I broadly agree. It's incredibly difficult to guess which parts of our code will turn out to be performance bottlenecks, and, conversely, which parts will become development bottlenecks because of the obscurity introduced by manual optimization. Eventually one develops instincts for this sort of thing, though they may be of less general applicability than we think …