Variables are drum BAGs!
Drum bag is important to drummers keep their drums safe, especially during a gig tour. But if you have a 22″ bass drum, there’ll be no way to fit in a 18″ drum bag! On other hand, if we put all 10″ and 12″ Toms into 20″ or 22″ bags which are original for bass drum, that does not only waste money but also your room space.
time flies!
Decades ago, the hardware of computer, such as CPU, RAM, Hard Disc, Main board …etc., is extremely high cost. The constraint of hardware also extremely affected the development of software.
At the time, as a software engineer we had to consider not only the run-time efficient of programs but the compiled size of codes. So, choosing suitable size of variables during programming was a fundamental task.
Now a days, ‘Giga’ is already the basic unit of memory space and the speed of CPU frequency. For this reason, software engineers are more comfortable to deal with the annoying stuff, like the efficient, the size and the scalability. But they probably omit the details of programming at the same time.
Be aware of the size
Even the project of Moon-Travel is going to be reality in the near future, I still believe that being aware of the size of variables is basic and a good habit to software developer.
Devil is in the detail. In my engineer career, I encountered a lot of strange and wired bugs. Most of the bugs were the causes of overlooking the details. If we can spend time in studying something we don’t know, not skip it and pretend it’s not important, we’ll obtain something in return in the future. All efforts will pay off!