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I find this hard to believe. Any time people write systems in a dynamic language, they inevitably run into issues as they scale, ending up wasting money (comput
by zenbowman 12y ago
I find this hard to believe. Any time people write systems in a dynamic language, they inevitably run into issues as they scale, ending up wasting money (computers, electricity) and a lot of user time. This usually results in rewriting things over and over.
Performance is always important. If you can solve a problem in 10% more time using a performant language, then it makes sense to do so, and I've seen few problems that I can express in Python or Ruby (painfully slow) that I cannot express in C++ (highly performant) or Scala (moderately performant) in roughly that amount of extra time.
- hyperpape 12y agoTime is not perfectly fungible. The only way to save time early on (prototyping and delivering products early on) may result in spending a lot of time later on.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- galvanist 12y agoDo you have any actual data to back your wild assertions? Entire domains of computer science are dedicated to productivity languages and many are widely used with great success and little or no overhead relative to C. (edit: for example scipy)
- zenbowman 12y agoI was stating an opinion based on my experience. I don't deny that tools like SciPy are very useful for experimental programming. However SciPy and Matlab are exceptions, where the end-user of the program is also the programmer, so the developer experience IS the user experience. In most cases, when you are a professional developer, you are not the end-user of your product. In these cases, deliberately choosing a less performant language for the sake of developer productivity can mean you end up penalizing the end user.
- enjoy-your-stay 12y agoGood point, and I think that that's why languages like Java and C# are very popular these days - they hit a good balance between performance and developer productivity.