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I don't think carbon footprint is the be-all end-all you suggest. In a startup that has yet to scale, trading off efficiency for, say, flexibility, safety, or e

I don't think carbon footprint is the be-all end-all you suggest. In a startup that has yet to scale, trading off efficiency for, say, flexibility, safety, or expressiveness may have minimal carbon impact but major benefit for your business. After all, few here will defend the choice of C for web service development these days.

abalone 8y ago
> In a startup... few here will defend the choice of C... Not sure what you're responding to but I specifically said "at scale" and "developer productivity / friendliness is important to overall success."
maweki 8y ago
I think 'safety' is the key term here. In the future we will see more self-driving cars and other self-... machines. I would like them to provably not crash (into me). If it were up to me, no matter the energy consumption, a piece of software in that realm should be proven correct (both crash-free and doing what the specification says).
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  >a piece of software in that realm should be proven correct (both crash-free and doing what the specification says)... You do realize that a lot of autonomous driving software uses ML techniques that make providing guarantees like that difficult, right? (To be honest, oftentimes we can't even provide an explanation of why an ML decision was made, let alone "prove" why an ML decision is made. We only show tha most of the time, 98.3995% or whatever, the system should do "something like this".) But in any case, none of that would affect the languages at issue here, because no one would write self driving software in any of these languages. There's about a 10,000% chance that any such startup would use GPU languages to do the meat of that work. Almost 0% chance any reputable company relies on something like go or swift to drive an automobile out on public roads.
  - abalone 8y ago
    > Almost 0% chance any reputable company relies on something like go or swift to drive an automobile out on public roads. You couldn’t be more wrong. Tesla hired the creator of Swift to run Autopilot software. He’s now at Google where he’s working on making Swift a primary language for TensorFlow.[1] [1] https://youtu.be/s65BigoMV_I https://youtu.be/s65BigoMV_I
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]

abalone 8y ago

> In a startup... few here will defend the choice of C... Not sure what you're responding to but I specifically said "at scale" and "developer productivity / friendliness is important to overall success."

maweki 8y ago

I think 'safety' is the key term here. In the future we will see more self-driving cars and other self-... machines. I would like them to provably not crash (into me). If it were up to me, no matter the energy consumption, a piece of software in that realm should be proven correct (both crash-free and doing what the specification says).

bilbo0s 8y ago
>a piece of software in that realm should be proven correct (both crash-free and doing what the specification says)... You do realize that a lot of autonomous driving software uses ML techniques that make providing guarantees like that difficult, right? (To be honest, oftentimes we can't even provide an explanation of why an ML decision was made, let alone "prove" why an ML decision is made. We only show tha most of the time, 98.3995% or whatever, the system should do "something like this".) But in any case, none of that would affect the languages at issue here, because no one would write self driving software in any of these languages. There's about a 10,000% chance that any such startup would use GPU languages to do the meat of that work. Almost 0% chance any reputable company relies on something like go or swift to drive an automobile out on public roads.
- abalone 8y ago
  > Almost 0% chance any reputable company relies on something like go or swift to drive an automobile out on public roads. You couldn’t be more wrong. Tesla hired the creator of Swift to run Autopilot software. He’s now at Google where he’s working on making Swift a primary language for TensorFlow.[1] [1] https://youtu.be/s65BigoMV_I https://youtu.be/s65BigoMV_I
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]