Breaking backwards compatiblity

[Matej Nanut]

I find the point on developing on a slower computer very interesting,
and here's my story.

I've been using an EeePC for everything for the past 2.5 years and
until now, I could cope. I'm getting a new laptop this week because I
direly need it at the faculty (some robotics/image processing/computer
vision — no way to run these on an EeePC realtime).

However, I could notice an interesting trend between my colleagues'
programs and mine. For example, solving the 15-game with heuristics
took ~0.01 secs on the Eee, and comparing to others' programs theirs
took several seconds and found worse solutions (not all of them of
course, but most). When doing some local search optimisation, the
difference was seconds-to-HOURS. I guess someone was really sloppy,
but still.

This has also been one of the reasons I became interested in languages
like C and D. Believe it or not, in our university, you don't ever get
to see C officially if you don't learn it yourself. I consider this
pathetic. The official and only taught language is Java. Which I grant
them is at least cross-platform, but I believe that every
university-educated programmer must know C.

I am convinced that my university produces bad programmers and as such
don't find it surprising that new written programs are terribly slow,
if they even work at all.

Matej