I had this program that was running slow and fixed the problem by fixing the I/O buffering. If I had a quarter for every time I’ve done this over my career, I’d have, well, two or three bucks. I think the language-design community ought to take notice. Currently, they cook up new languages so object-oriented that each individual bit has a method repertoire, languages so concurrent that threads execute in incommensurable parallel universes, languages so functional that their effects are completely unobservable... How about a radical new language where the runtime system is hyperaggressive about ensuring that all of its I/O primitives are by default buffered unless the programmer specifically requests otherwise? I’ve heard that there’s something called “COBOL” that has this capability, I’ll have to check it out.
