Welcome to Fractal Forums

The premise here is that only real programmers spend more on a single computer than on a single car.

So what's your programming strength i.e. cost of latest computer/cost of latest car ?

Mine's currently 4.5

*but* when I got my first windows PC (a bl**dy awful AJP import) which was a W95A P66 laptop with all accesories including docking station and extra hard drive, external keyboard, mouse etc. it cost a cool £3000 and the car I had then was about £500 so that gives.....

My highest:  6

To be honest if I could afford it then the ratio would be astronomical since I don't believe anything for simply travelling from a to b overland is worth more than £1000 in today's money but I'd happily spend trillions on computer power if I had the money ;)

Edit: Of course given rediculously large funds I'd actually spend it on setting up the ultimate software research and development studios :)

You do not have to be a programmer to have ratios like that... ;)

I refute your premise. Real programmers program arduino's and build robot armies.  :dink:
The story of the original "Real Programmer" (the story of Mel) can be found here http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html
To answer your question my real programmer ratio is .27

What price do I plug into the formula if I never owned car? Using my most expensive bicycle as a reference, and the most expensive computer purchase (including accessories and a display device), I end up somewhere near 12.5 ...

0? places your ratio at positive infinity.

Or Undefined.

What about those, who have computer - still no car... Then I am bloody good programmer my programming strength tends ot inifnity.

P.S. Hope, not negative  :sad1:

Divide by zero exceptions. Exceptions are hardly ever a good thing when programming (generally means your application crashes if you leave it unattended and in this particular case it is not defined), so I'd buy a car if I were you.

I guess we could simply adapt the original formula and use (1+cost of computer)/(1+cost of car) which is the usual type of trick used in many colouring algorithms - and of course gives 1 if you have neither computer nor car ;)
My last car got written off after a blowout causing collapsed suspension (driver's side front) so I had to get a new (old) car, cost £550, so my ratio using the new method is now:

4501/551 = 8.17

Although admittedly that's ignoring any minor repairs necessary on the new car (e.g. am waiting for new fuel gauge as it currently just registers as empty).

Hmm, what about computer prices varying? Custom built computers are quite cheap to make and give a lot of power. Btw, do you think it would be safe to overclock my CPU if I have an overpowered cooling system? (Computer temperature is never higher than "cold metal")