From: Austin Ziegler <halostatue@...>
Date: 2005-08-16T03:55:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Performance Ruby

On 8/15/05, Isaac Gouy <igouy@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Austin Ziegler wrote:
>> On 8/11/05, Jeff Wood <jeff.darklight@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> There is an online comparison of MANY computer languages ...
>>> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/
>>> ... there are some programs that don't seem to have any ruby
>>> solution yet... if any of you feel up to it, ( or if you want to
>>> look at the existing solutions that are there and performance tweak
>>> them ) ...  It would be a "good thing"
>>>
>>> Anyways, I hope that provides the informatoin that the original post
>>> was looking for.
>> The best option for this shootout is to NOT implement anything for
>> it.
>>
>> The people running it don't know the first thing about what they're
>> doing and won't take responsibility for the errors in methodology and
>> the fact that their presentation encourages bad interpretation. The
>> Alioth shootout is dishonest to its core.
> This is baseless abuse.

Incorrect. This is not baseless abuse. It is accurate based on numerous
discussions in which you have been involved. You refuse to acknowledge
that the shootout encourages bad interpretation (e.g., the whole "lang
v. lang" comparisons, the graphs, etc.), and you refuse to modify the
way that the whole idiotic enterprise works to discourage such bad
interpretation.

> Lothar Scholz is demonstrably correct - some pure Ruby programs will
> be hundreds of times slower than optimized compiled code, and some
> programs will be as little as 1.5x slower.

That's actually an irrelevancy and, itself, is a bad interpretation.
Hand-tuned assembler will often be much faster than even optimized
compiled code. Do you want to write everything in assembler? I thought
not.

> Whether that matters or not depends on what we're trying to
> accomplish.

And what I'm trying to accomplish is to convince people to stop using
your stupid project, because your project is based on dishonest
pseudo-statistical comparisons and idiotic "benchmarks." At least have
the honesty and decency to start admitting you don't know what you're
doing and start *removing* some things from the web pages that encourage
bad interpretation.

As to your other post, I haven't submitted a bug because I think that
the whole project is a waste. The only bug report that I'd submit would
be "shut the whole damned things down." Of course, you'll ignore it.
There is also the point that while your pages may not explicitly state
that one should improve the performance of one's own language, there is
strong implicit encouragement toward such, and the blind acceptance of
tests that are on the verge of cheating (e.g., the Perl Ackermann; the
Python Ackermann isn't far off, either, given that it won't run at all
without one particular non-algorithmic line, while not running the Ruby
Ackermann with OS configurations that *will* let it run) indicate that
you really are as clueless as I think you are.

-austin
-- 
Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com
               * Alternate: austin@halostatue.ca