3 ms·

Well, there are some interesting new languages out there already: https://julialang.org/ https://julialang.org/ In fact Moore’s law must have been the reason w

Well, there are some interesting new languages out there already: https://julialang.org/ https://julialang.org/ In fact Moore’s law must have been the reason why Python is what it is today: “Who cares if it’s slow, tomorrow’s computers will be faster!”

elihu 8y ago
I think the current attitude could be summed up better as "Who care's if it's inefficient, yesterday's computers are fast enough!" I think that's true of most software, but not all -- there will always be people who care about the best performance, but we shouldn't expect them to be in the majority.
- fsloth 8y ago
  "there will always be people who care about the best performance, but we shouldn't expect them to be in the majority." Given how machine learning is going to kick in in lots of fields quite soon there will be a lot of real world applications that are not ambivalent about performance (if not else then from energy use point of view). We're going to get Clippy the Clipper 2.0 who can actually do something usefull, and how long he spends figuring out his suggestions and how good they are are likely to be dependent on the available CPU resources and how fast Clippy can think.
pyrale 8y ago
In the case of Python, who cares if it's slow, it's a thin wrapper around a C lib!
dnautics 8y ago
I would say erlang is an interesting new language, except that it's not new. The idea of a functional language that is just very careful about its impurities and has a clever way of managing state without spinlocks or mutexes is a great thing. Beam languages have almost no footguns and programming them feels like programming with inflated gutterball balloons. A chip architecture that was highly optimized for the beam would be great.
gaius 8y ago
Who cares if it’s slow, tomorrow’s computers will be faster! Well, that’s a misrepresentation of history, the Python ethos has always been to drop into C for performance critical sections. That’s why NumPy won, and why Numba is highly competitive with Julia, and you can keep your existing code.

elihu 8y ago

I think the current attitude could be summed up better as "Who care's if it's inefficient, yesterday's computers are fast enough!" I think that's true of most software, but not all -- there will always be people who care about the best performance, but we shouldn't expect them to be in the majority.

fsloth 8y ago
"there will always be people who care about the best performance, but we shouldn't expect them to be in the majority." Given how machine learning is going to kick in in lots of fields quite soon there will be a lot of real world applications that are not ambivalent about performance (if not else then from energy use point of view). We're going to get Clippy the Clipper 2.0 who can actually do something usefull, and how long he spends figuring out his suggestions and how good they are are likely to be dependent on the available CPU resources and how fast Clippy can think.

pyrale 8y ago

In the case of Python, who cares if it's slow, it's a thin wrapper around a C lib!

dnautics 8y ago

I would say erlang is an interesting new language, except that it's not new. The idea of a functional language that is just very careful about its impurities and has a clever way of managing state without spinlocks or mutexes is a great thing. Beam languages have almost no footguns and programming them feels like programming with inflated gutterball balloons. A chip architecture that was highly optimized for the beam would be great.

gaius 8y ago

Who cares if it’s slow, tomorrow’s computers will be faster! Well, that’s a misrepresentation of history, the Python ethos has always been to drop into C for performance critical sections. That’s why NumPy won, and why Numba is highly competitive with Julia, and you can keep your existing code.