From: Austin Ziegler Date: 2005-06-13T03:38:13+09:00 Subject: Re: python/ruby benchmark(don't shoot the messenger) On 6/12/05, Steven Jenkins wrote: > Austin Ziegler wrote: > What's more amazing is that these fools why buy into this "crap" have > made fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of digital > communications, image processing, and numerical analysis, practically > invented systems engineering, found volcanoes on Io and landslides on > Venus, communicated with spacecraft beyond the edge of the solar system, > put three rovers on the surface of Mars, and a whole bunch of other > stuff that will go into history books. Huh. They didn't do it with benchmarks. (And I could very easily point out that those same people have screwed up massively -- forgetting to convert between English units and Metric units?) Look closely at the people who espouse benchmarks. They're mostly marketers or fools who can't tell the difference. There are *real* measures to deal with; they're not benchmarks. They aren't and never have been. For a first person shooter, the real measure is "is the game fun?" The answer will be different for everyone, but there are some objective things that will break the "fun" factor for just about everyone. Frames Per Second. Load Time. These things should be as fast as they possibly can. Gigaflops never enters the question here. Nor does specmark or anything else like that. For image manipulations, they need to be quick. But not once does the Ackermann function ever enter the question. > But of course, you know better. You have A Blog and have written Some > Software. I do know better. It's not because I have a blog (I do, but I haven't updated it in months, because I've been busy writing Real Software for Real People). And I've written a LOT of software. No, I've never worked for NASA. But I have real world experience, and I know what I speak of. Never *once* have I needed to implement an Ackermann function. Not once. In my entire career. I look at the crap that is on alioth and there's very little that represents common use. There's some neat things -- the new DNA transformation ones -- but exactly how many people will actually be using that in their work? I won't. Wouldn't have my entire career. Measures that mattered to me at my last job were "how many bills can I generate in an hour?" At my current job "what's the average backup speed throughput for this?" If we're not getting the performance we need, we fix the damn problem. We don't rely on "benchmarks" -- we rely on real world measurements of our real problems. Not on pseudo-crap like gigaflops or specmark or the speed of an airborne swallow. Actually, strike that. The last is useful. -austin -- Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com * Alternate: austin@halostatue.ca