>i remeber the days when computers were not so fast, and every splitt second you could gain was helpfull to speed up your app.
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>today, computers are ofcourse much faster, which resulted in the major problem:
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>us programers got SPOILED!

I agree - and I have seen lots of examples where something hard-to-do was developed up to a point where it started working correctly, and then left as such, without a single thought over any optimizations. I've had the pleasure of performing a few simple tricks and maybe adding a few not so simple ones, to see speedups of up to 20 times.

One special example, which used to repeat a lot, was when a tree was built by recursive Selects, each time to stop only when no records were returned, so it practically ran as many selects as there were records in the table - and that was in a child form which popped up each time user would look up for an item in a hierarchical list of a few hundred records. Even with so few records, it was damn slow. The trick was to build an additional key, which would sort the records in the order they were supposed to show in the tree(view), and run all those Selects only when the table was edited, which happened about 200 times less frequently. The speedup factor was about 100 (i.e. from few seconds to instantaneous).

>i think it is still imperative for a developer these days to understand and apply the basics. and i think i could com up with a few apps where it is still important to be able to cut down on proccessor time.
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>1 example, i would suspect, could be statistical calculations, going through a huge dbf. or another 1 id did a few years back: a calculation for lottery. that thing ran 3 month day and night. needless to say, every splitt second in the repeating loops were very valuable.

And it actually doesn't matter that the computers are so much more powerful - we force them to do harder and harder stuff, so we're in a permanent game of cops and thieves. Knowing what may make your software slow never hurts, and knowing how to make it fast may make you the hero of the day.