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> Why hasn't this happened? Preumably if you use an advanced language you'll be a lot more productive because of the language and because you have the best deve

> Why hasn't this happened? Preumably if you use an advanced language you'll be a lot more productive because of the language and because you have the best developers. > Why haven't we seen shops that use advanced languages just utterly clean up? "Oh, you're doing 30fps with 1m vertices -- we just did 90fps with 50m vertices -- and btw, we did this w/o using the GPU". More productive doesn't mean more performant. It means building systems more quickly, a phenomenon for which there is ample evidence. Large companies using less productive languages can still achieve great performance because they can throw lots and lots of resources at the problem, even if the payoff per head is much lower.

kenjackson 16y ago
More productive doesn't mean more performant. Where performance matters, I'd think they'd just build codegen systems, using the advanced language. They should still have a fundamental advantage here since they could build codegen systems faster and presumably with better codegen techniques. It means building systems more quickly, a phenomenon for which there is ample evidence. So what is the evidence? Large companies using less productive languages can still achieve great performance because they can throw lots and lots of resources at the problem, even if the payoff per head is much lower. But even with small/medium sized companies you don't see this happening. It just seems like everytime someone tries to show me how some company has done something incredible with advanced languages it is really borderline. It's never, "wow, slam dunk" For example, I've never seen a Wolfenstein 3D from an advanced language. Soemthing that just blows away everything else. WordLens wasn't done with some advanced language. Google search engine. Excel. VMWare. There aren't a lot of big jumps in SW, but few, if any, seem to have come to market quickly (if at all) due to advanced languages. You'd think they'd be able to take these advanced languages and top flight devs to change the face of software. But it usually turns into arguments about how their code is less buggy or produced faster. Both hard to really judge objectively given one rarely writes the same program concurrently in two different languages. And the delta rarely seems large enough that it is obvious.
- technomancy 16y ago
  The most obvious slam-dunk I can think of is Emacs. Twenty years later there's still nothing else like it when it comes to extensibility and interactivity.
- lars512 16y ago
  Well, the advanced languages often compile through low level languages like C anyhow, to get the performance they have. In terms of productivity, I remember running into this comparison including Haskell and C++ from '94. http://www.nt.ntnu.no/users/haugwarb/Programming/Haskell/haskell_vs_ada_vs_cpp_vs_awk_vs_etc.pdf http://www.nt.ntnu.no/users/haugwarb/Programming/Haskell/has... I'm also curious as to why functional programming hasn't been more successful. I think that, whilst such languages are especially elegant for some forms of control flow, they require more mental contortions than mixed-paradigm languages. Since this makes them less comfortable, they're less popular still.

kenjackson 16y ago

More productive doesn't mean more performant. Where performance matters, I'd think they'd just build codegen systems, using the advanced language. They should still have a fundamental advantage here since they could build codegen systems faster and presumably with better codegen techniques. It means building systems more quickly, a phenomenon for which there is ample evidence. So what is the evidence? Large companies using less productive languages can still achieve great performance because they can throw lots and lots of resources at the problem, even if the payoff per head is much lower. But even with small/medium sized companies you don't see this happening. It just seems like everytime someone tries to show me how some company has done something incredible with advanced languages it is really borderline. It's never, "wow, slam dunk" For example, I've never seen a Wolfenstein 3D from an advanced language. Soemthing that just blows away everything else. WordLens wasn't done with some advanced language. Google search engine. Excel. VMWare. There aren't a lot of big jumps in SW, but few, if any, seem to have come to market quickly (if at all) due to advanced languages. You'd think they'd be able to take these advanced languages and top flight devs to change the face of software. But it usually turns into arguments about how their code is less buggy or produced faster. Both hard to really judge objectively given one rarely writes the same program concurrently in two different languages. And the delta rarely seems large enough that it is obvious.

technomancy 16y ago
The most obvious slam-dunk I can think of is Emacs. Twenty years later there's still nothing else like it when it comes to extensibility and interactivity.
lars512 16y ago
Well, the advanced languages often compile through low level languages like C anyhow, to get the performance they have. In terms of productivity, I remember running into this comparison including Haskell and C++ from '94. http://www.nt.ntnu.no/users/haugwarb/Programming/Haskell/haskell_vs_ada_vs_cpp_vs_awk_vs_etc.pdf http://www.nt.ntnu.no/users/haugwarb/Programming/Haskell/has... I'm also curious as to why functional programming hasn't been more successful. I think that, whilst such languages are especially elegant for some forms of control flow, they require more mental contortions than mixed-paradigm languages. Since this makes them less comfortable, they're less popular still.