5 ms·
>Even a language like Ruby, which tends to hang near the bottom of any performance-oriented benchmark, is thousands of times faster than BASICs that people were
by muststopmyths 6y ago
>Even a language like Ruby, which tends to hang near the bottom of any performance-oriented benchmark, is thousands of times faster than BASICs that people were learning to program 8-bit home computers with in the 1980s. That's not an exaggeration, I do mean thousands.
I don't buy it. Unless we're comparing the computers BASIC ran on to computers today.
- pwinnski 6y agoI think it's pretty clear that's exactly what we're doing. BASIC on a 6502, Ruby on a VM atop an AMD Ryzen or some such.
- mixmastamyk 6y agoSounds like its comparing lang+hardware but wrote a sentence comparing only the langs, hence the confusion.
- spc476 6y agoHe goes into that statement in a later post: https://prog21.dadgum.com/52.html https://prog21.dadgum.com/52.html
- solveit 6y agoSo people don't have to click through: Yes, the comparison is between '80s hardware and '00s hardware.
- m_mueller 6y agoWhat I would agree with is a factor of 1000 in programming productivity between e.g. python and BASIC for many common usecases. Having such a powerful standard lib is a huge advantage.