Algorithms Matter, mostly

I often hear about language wars where my language, such as c++ or another c derivative language, is better than your language, like Visual Basic.  There will be all kinds of basis for this, from letter counts to compile times to the man in the moon.  no, no, and no.  In my 30+ years of development, for the work that I do, languages do not matter.

First, let’s look at the kind of work that I do.  It is the same as 99% of developers.  There is some type of code that sits in front of some type of datastore.  This can be as simple as a web application sitting in front of a database. In general, there is some type of application that talks to some type of datastore.   There tends to be all kinds of plumbing between the application and the data store.  The application could be any type of application from a user interface standpoint.  It could be a web interface, a windows app, an iPhone app, or something else.  The datastore is most like a database with some type of intelligent processing happening, so it could be the database, a messaging system, some central processing, web services, or a host of other things.

You want to use your datastore as much as possible.  You don’t want to have a lot of communication between the database and the rest of the application.  Those are chatty apps, and can be really slow.  You also want to optimize your database, a good schema, a good indexing set based on the queries that the application runs are a good thing.

Now, a lot of algorithms don’t lend themselves to operating within a relational database.  A good Loic layer close to your database while only sending results to your front end application, now that is what is important.

Create optimal,algorithms, and your performance problems tend to solve the,selves.