From: Robert Feldt <feldt@...>
Date: 2003-09-16T02:57:24+09:00
Subject: Re: performance and style advice requested

Alex Martelli <aleaxit@yahoo.com> skrev den Tue, 16 Sep 2003 02:48:00 +0900:

>>>> While I doubt you should compare these languages on performance merits
>
> *blink* why not, pray?  While clarity, productivity, simplicity, and so on,
> are surely all crucial attributes in a language, what's wrong with wanting
> to ascertain how it performs (when used in the best/fastest way, at least)
> in typical problems in one's domains of interest...?  A 10% or 20% difference is hardly ever going to matter, but factors of 2 or 3 might
> well make the difference, in practice, between two languages of otherwise
> comparable merits -- and that's what I am observing here, so far (at least
> in the toy/starting problem which I'm using as a warm-up exercise -- we'll
> see what happens when I move to bigger and more interesting problems, e.g.
> I cannot exclude that Ruby's performance might "scale up" better, or whatever).
>
Nothing wrong with the comparison but:

1, If performance is *REALLY* important to you, you wouldn't use Python or Ruby anyway, IMHO, so their relative performance
   is less important than any of them compared to C.

2, Performance is hard to compare since algorithmic differences is often
   so much more important than the gains you get with "tweak-like"
   performance tuning (for example the 16-time speedup of your problem I presented earlier)

3, There has been a couple of troll-like "Ruby has nothing to offer
   compared to Python" threads in the last couple of weeks

so please understand my response in that context.

Regards,

Robert