williamedwardscoder:

There is something really wrong with modern programmers.  Very wrong indeed.

Mailinator creator Paul Tyma has a great blog post on how he compresses our email by 90%. He  has a simple LRU cache of lines and consecutive lines from emails, so emails become a list of line IDs.  He also has a background thread doing rather stronger LZMA compression on large emails.  He’s winning.

Thing is, in one of the comments on the Hacker News version of the article, someone wonders why he didn’t use Redis for the LRU.

I think of the kindest, least shouting way to hint that that’s not such a good idea; I say it might be higher latency to block on a Redis LRU than using a in-process data-structure.  The commenter responds by saying that Redis is known to be fast; that he have just chosen node.js and Redis for his startup because of its performance.

This is wrong on so many levels.  So many levels.  I don’t single this person out - they are just a useful illustration.  Their mindset is endemic in this industry.  All around you, the new generation of programmers are making the same assumptions.

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