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Maybe that's because scripting languages are a bad idea for anything performance critical anyway - and experience has shown that even if things are not performa

Maybe that's because scripting languages are a bad idea for anything performance critical anyway - and experience has shown that even if things are not performance critical initially, they might become eventually. So why would you write anything in a scripting language only to rewrite it later in a compiled langue, if you could have used an equally capable compiled language in the first place?

kitotik 7y ago
Time to market.
simonh 7y ago
Performance just isn’t the only, or always the most important factor when choosing a language. Sometimes we choose a language and it’s ecosystem for factors we know we value right now, rather than ones we might value later on.
KirinDave 7y ago
> Maybe that's because scripting languages are a bad idea for anything performance critical anyway This is an example of how programming as a discipline and activity is consistently dismissed by the software community as an unnecessary contrivance. "What about absolute performance?" But the reality is you're making tons of those tradeoffs. You're using a compiler, on an instruction set designed for humans, leaning on network stacks that do work for you in generic but sub-optimal ways, using container systems that introduce huge performance penalties. Those are socially acceptable to you. They're special in that you think they aren't special. > So why would you write anything in a scripting language only to rewrite it later in a compiled langue, if you could have used an equally capable compiled language in the first place? This assumes they are in fact equally capable. Please don't retort with Turing completeness. That's a copout and we all know you aren't about to go shipping things in BF.
nrdvana 7y ago
Or they go the other way, after an initial assumption that the task was performance-critical when in fact a scripting language was perfectly capable and took 1/10 the effort to write. https://opensource.com/article/18/1/my-delorean-runs-perl https://opensource.com/article/18/1/my-delorean-runs-perl

kitotik 7y ago

Time to market.

simonh 7y ago

Performance just isn’t the only, or always the most important factor when choosing a language. Sometimes we choose a language and it’s ecosystem for factors we know we value right now, rather than ones we might value later on.

KirinDave 7y ago

> Maybe that's because scripting languages are a bad idea for anything performance critical anyway This is an example of how programming as a discipline and activity is consistently dismissed by the software community as an unnecessary contrivance. "What about absolute performance?" But the reality is you're making tons of those tradeoffs. You're using a compiler, on an instruction set designed for humans, leaning on network stacks that do work for you in generic but sub-optimal ways, using container systems that introduce huge performance penalties. Those are socially acceptable to you. They're special in that you think they aren't special. > So why would you write anything in a scripting language only to rewrite it later in a compiled langue, if you could have used an equally capable compiled language in the first place? This assumes they are in fact equally capable. Please don't retort with Turing completeness. That's a copout and we all know you aren't about to go shipping things in BF.

nrdvana 7y ago

Or they go the other way, after an initial assumption that the task was performance-critical when in fact a scripting language was perfectly capable and took 1/10 the effort to write. https://opensource.com/article/18/1/my-delorean-runs-perl https://opensource.com/article/18/1/my-delorean-runs-perl