3 ms·
When you say that 1L of distilled water at some temperature weighs 1 kg I'll take it as more or less objective. When somebody says that general purpose language
by FpUser 6y ago
When you say that 1L of distilled water at some temperature weighs 1 kg I'll take it as more or less objective. When somebody says that general purpose language is superior just because it has REPL and no compile time I take it as purely subjective. Some languages/implementation while producing native code have perceptually instantaneous compile time, so here is your REPL. And they scale as the task grow way better then Python.
I think it is just your private /subjective opinion and it is not any better than mine.
- Jetrel 6y agoI have to believe there's a block of people out there who just assume "nigh-instantaneous compile time" is a bit of a bigfoot. Or maybe they assume that, if you have that, why wouldn't you make the jump to writing a REPL, since the hard part is done... Just making some guesses.
- FpUser 6y agoNo , I would not "make the jump to writing REPL". I was addressing this: "Python is superior to C and Rust for most kinds of scripting tasks, given equal mastery of both. It has a REPL, it doesn't have a compile time" To me it makes the impression that you are conflating here, hence my answer about REPL. Technically of course REPL is different from having "no compile time". In any case I do not really consider opinion about Python being the better one for scripting tasks as anything but subjective.
- Jetrel 6y agoAs we mentioned before, those weren't my opinions, just my guesses about other people's opinions.
- wtetzner 6y agoOCaml more or less has both. Very fast compile times, but also REPL support. It however does not have Python's batteries-included standard library. Luckily Opam is starting to make that less of an issue.
- eloff 6y agoAre you saying there isn't a an objective answer in this case? Because I don't agree with that. Given a specific task and 100 programmers equally skilled in both languages, they will accomplish the task faster in one. There will be a clear and statistically significant answer if one were to do a controlled study. It could be that the result is that they are nearly equal, but that would be a surprising outcome. So when you say my opinion is the equal of yours, you're just saying you have no idea which is closer to the objective truth so you can't compare them. But fundamentally they are not equal and one opinion will be right and one will be wrong (in this case because it's a boolean outcome). It is my opinion, it is subjective, but I also am willing to bet it's right. And there is a right and wrong answer here regardless of our ability to know it for sure.