4 ms·

That philosophy isn't particularly relevant or useful. How else can you truthfully compare 2 things? Do you always pre-emptively give up and say "well things ar

That philosophy isn't particularly relevant or useful. How else can you truthfully compare 2 things? Do you always pre-emptively give up and say "well things are always kind of different anyway so it doesn't matter how they compare"? PS, big O isn't everything. The constant factors that big O hides are in fact meaningful and can make or break an algorithm. Some languages make some constants worse by having extra overhead in some places or better when they have special facilities. See also: sorting algorithms deferring to insertion sort O(n²) for small runs, galactic algorithms. See also: languages where everything is a pointer to dynamic memory, vs languages that have actual values. The language default "dictionary" implementation and its time and space complexities. I could go on. For energy efficiency, or memory efficiency, or speed, choice of language does matter, and depending on the size and nature of the data, can overshadow algorithmic choices.

saagarjha 3y ago
I'm not saying those things don't matter, or that it's not possible that you can overcome some algorithmic complexity just by brute forcing it with a smaller constant. I'm saying that it is exceptionally rare that you are ever in a situation where you can go "oh I have these two identical pieces of software, let's just pick the one that uses the efficient language". Really, it comes down to this question: "this code is slow, what should I do to improve it?". The answer is usually "fix the time complexity somewhere or do less work" and it becomes good enough. Maybe in some isolated cases I might rewrite a bit of it in a different language if appropriate. When I say "time complexity dominates footprint" I mean that most of the code changes I make along the lines of changing something to take "100 ms → 2 ms" where the other language would be "25 ms → 0.5 ms" but you can see why I would not say that the language dominates here.

saagarjha 3y ago

I'm not saying those things don't matter, or that it's not possible that you can overcome some algorithmic complexity just by brute forcing it with a smaller constant. I'm saying that it is exceptionally rare that you are ever in a situation where you can go "oh I have these two identical pieces of software, let's just pick the one that uses the efficient language". Really, it comes down to this question: "this code is slow, what should I do to improve it?". The answer is usually "fix the time complexity somewhere or do less work" and it becomes good enough. Maybe in some isolated cases I might rewrite a bit of it in a different language if appropriate. When I say "time complexity dominates footprint" I mean that most of the code changes I make along the lines of changing something to take "100 ms → 2 ms" where the other language would be "25 ms → 0.5 ms" but you can see why I would not say that the language dominates here.