“

I fell in love with Jommy Cross—talk about pulp fiction déjà vu. Fifties Ace paperback flashbacks—nostalgic jump-cuts into the future. The way he talked to me—without moving his pouty lips. He was such a moody kid—it hurt me just looking at him.

He could be in Portland—or Alpha Centauri for all I was concerned. It didn’t make any difference—where we were. He was always there—in the back of my mind. That’s the way—Astounding Science Fiction worked for me.

That’s how the Fabulation of the Fifties—doesn’t die. The pulp fiction reality of Slan love—isn’t that what it was like back then? It’s even better now—let the jouissance flow. The way it was in noir rainy Seattle—back then in the late Sixties.

Let’s face it—I was queer for him. After the first time—I was really fucked. Talk about being— Stranger in a Strange Land. I needed a Mirror for Observers really bad—to get outta that one.

I wasn’t a butchy Heinlein Space Cadet either—I wasn’t particularly Star Trooper material. I checked the box—instead of being drafted. Viet Nam was Forbidden Planet—as far as I was concerned.

I was a lover—not a fighter. I didn’t feel guilty—about being a hippie. Late Capitalism and postcolonial jive—didn’t appeal to me.

Instead I was seriously addicted to Slan love.

“

The conventional wisdom shared by many of today’s software engineers calls for ignoring efficiency in the small; but I believe this is simply an overreaction to the abuses they see being practiced by pennywise-and-pound-foolish programmers, who can’t debug or maintain their “optimized” programs. In established engineering disciplines a 12% improvement, easily obtained, is never considered marginal; and I believe the same viewpoint should prevail in software engineering….

There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.