An Exciting Three-Quarters Of A Second

I'm sick, you know. Terribly sick. Why? What's wrong? I get excited about stupid trivial geekish crap. That's why I'm sick.

An example. I'm writing a dice probability module in Perl (for those non-geeks among my readers, that translates to "I waste hours of my spare personal time writing computer code that calculates complex mathematics as they relate to dice."). This module is nearly ready for public release and scrutiny, and has been years in the research, discussion, planning, and implementation. The actual code only has taken a few weeks of off and on coding, but the mathematics behind it is a whole other story.

"Fine, so you have a hobby interest in math," I hear you saying. No, I'm afraid it is far sicker than that. You see, part of the design of this code has been to review other similar code that I've been able to find on the Internet. This involves hours of combing the web for interesting code, reading it, evaluating it, learning from it where possible, and improving my own understanding and code at the same time.

"So? We all waste time on the web. Who cares?" Well, you see, I found a piece of code, written in a mathematician-friendly computer language, that does some arcane seemingly magical things, even if it is obtuse as can be. I've read and reread the code, I've tried to grok its inner math-wonk workings, without much success. But it has served well as companion code, allowing me to verify my software's math against someone else's.

"This is getting boring. And?!" Well, after using this tool for a while as test code for my own, and once my code was nearing first-round completion, I decided to benchmark the two pieces of software. I was curious to see which is faster: the mathematician-written code written in a mathematician-friendly language, or the uber-geek-cum-math-hobbyist-written code written in a generic scripting language? Initial testing proved my code was faster. I was very very VERY excited. So excited I was nearly doing a little dance in my chair...my code was faster, my code was faster!

"*sigh* HOW much faster?!" Ummm. Three-quarters of a second for a five-node, multi-computation dice expression. Ummm, yeah.

"THREE-QUARTERS OF A SECOND?! WHO THE FUCK CARES?! GET A LIFE! YOU ARE SO FUCKING SAD!" *sigh* Yeah, I told you I was sick...