5 ms·

jacques, calm down, please. This is a fun comparison showing off some features of both languages. Notice in example 2 where Python is actually the most concise

by lbj 17y ago

jacques, calm down, please. This is a fun comparison showing off some features of both languages. Notice in example 2 where Python is actually the most concise, cleanly written example where my code comes out looking a bit cramped? It's not a hatchet job, it's a comparison which will tell you something about both languages. Sure I like the real world examples too, but for a simple outline of a few of their respective qualities this should tell you enough. If you have a larger project you'd want to tag-team on, showing the capabilities of both languages on a much larger scale I'm definitely up for it, that would also be educational.

jacquesm 17y ago
I'm pretty calm, thank you. I don't have a dog in this fight, I like both languages for pushing the envelope, but I wouldn't consider myself qualified to do a comparison that is meaningful. The only language where I think I could make any statements is C, and that's only because of decades of using it. I've used PHP for business reasons for 10 years and I still wouldn't think I'm qualified to write a benchmark comparing PHP to something else. The other day, there was a discussion here about 'the hundred year language' (that essay by PG), and I wrote that if there is a candidate for that spot it's either Clojure or Erlang, and my money would be on clojure fwiw. The python guys ripping in to perl with cherry picked examples, the clojure guys ripping in to python it gets us exactly nowhere. You don't need to compare to anything to show excellence. But if you're going to do it, Rosetta is the right way to do it. If you want to do runtime comparisons then I think you should get a person that has at least your skills in python to have a look at what's going on, and you should not just show one example where you come out ahead. You should show many examples along the lines of the great programming language shootout. Again, that's real work. Who knows how many were tried where clojure was terribly slow that were not shown for that reason and so on. Hand-picked, biased, a waste of time.
- lbj 17y ago
  jacques, I don't quite agree with your sentiment that excellence stands on it's own, but time will tell. I'd just like to correct two mistakes you made. 1) I didn't pick examples where Clojure runs circles around Python - Like I've stated before, Example #2 is a lot cleaner in Python than what I wrote. The fact that my implementation is 9.4x faster than the Python teams is not subjective and tells you something important about parallelized sequence consumption. 2) I didn't hand pick anything, I picked Lehman because it was on the front page, followed another link to something which didn't have a Python solution, another to the 'Count examples' and so on. I didn't set Python up for sniping, which I why I think the comparison is interesting. And for the record: I think Python came out looking pretty good.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    > I didn't set Python up for sniping, which I why I think the comparison is interesting. Ok, I'll take that at face value then, but from the writing I sure got a different impression. This may be my language skills though, tone of voice is a subtle thing. Quotes that are confusing to me: > which (until the next release) is a bit slow on the JVM. Is that meant as an apology for bad performance on one benchmark ? If so why apologize, in a benchmark all that matters is the facts, it's slow, or it's not. You leave out the timings on this benchmark, concentrate just on the line count, which suggests in combination with the above that clojure performed less well than python but you left out that data. Or maybe it wasn't, but it would have been consistent to show run-times for all examples, code size for all examples (and coded up in roughly the same way), preferably gzipp'd to get rid of formatting bias. > Might be a little confusing, but it's a great performance booster. << means bit-shift-left and Who is your audience here ? Any programmer worth their salt recognizes a shift operation when they see one. In your clojure examples you consistently count only the lines with code, in the python examples you count the blank lines as well. Besides, who cares about line count when one language puts a whole pile of expressions on one line and the other does not, clearly, line count is not going to be a good metric to compare the one to the other. You're also counting lines which define constants used only once and lines that print headers, the clojure program doesn't have those luxuries. So, let's rewrite the python code like you wrote the clojure code: from math import sqrt def is_prime ( p ): if p == 2: return True if p <= 1 or p % 2 == 0: return False for i in range(3, int(sqrt(p))+1, 2 ): if p % i == 0: return False return True def is_mersenne_prime ( p ): if p == 2: return True m_p = ( 1 << p ) - 1 s = 4 for i in range(3, p+1): s = (s ** 2 - 2) % m_p return s == 0 for p in range(2, 33219): if is_prime(p) and is_mersenne_prime(p): print("M%d"%p); Now, please note that I'm not a python programmer of any standing and that I've mangled the code to make it shorter but keep it functional, to compare apples with apples. If linecount was that important than I could shorten it by quite a bit further, but I don't think it is a very useful metric, especially not if you count whitespace lines in one and not in the other. Btw, this one is now 16 lines. Not as small as the clojure example, but less than half of what it was before, I'm sure a real python guru could shorten that by another couple of lines, essentially there is no real significant difference between python and clojure here. The solution where you claim an impressive speed boost is mostly due to the simply running a bunch of tasks in parallel, which when opening stuff through the network is of course a big boon. If the files would have been resident the test would have been more meaningful, otherwise you would have to compare apples with apples by running multiple crawlers feeding a single reducer. And that would have been a sample worth making, but you couldn't be bothered. Then the clojure program would probably have been much shorter than the python one. By the way, running that counting example on my computer here I get a time of 5:47, which is about twice as fast as your clojure run, wonder why that would be. It is also 24!! times as fast as the time that you report for python. I'm not quite accusing you of cooking the books but it would be nice to have you find out what went so terribly wrong when you ran that test. And so on. Really, I'm not impressed. >

by lbj 17y ago

jacquesm 17y ago

I'm pretty calm, thank you. I don't have a dog in this fight, I like both languages for pushing the envelope, but I wouldn't consider myself qualified to do a comparison that is meaningful. The only language where I think I could make any statements is C, and that's only because of decades of using it. I've used PHP for business reasons for 10 years and I still wouldn't think I'm qualified to write a benchmark comparing PHP to something else. The other day, there was a discussion here about 'the hundred year language' (that essay by PG), and I wrote that if there is a candidate for that spot it's either Clojure or Erlang, and my money would be on clojure fwiw. The python guys ripping in to perl with cherry picked examples, the clojure guys ripping in to python it gets us exactly nowhere. You don't need to compare to anything to show excellence. But if you're going to do it, Rosetta is the right way to do it. If you want to do runtime comparisons then I think you should get a person that has at least your skills in python to have a look at what's going on, and you should not just show one example where you come out ahead. You should show many examples along the lines of the great programming language shootout. Again, that's real work. Who knows how many were tried where clojure was terribly slow that were not shown for that reason and so on. Hand-picked, biased, a waste of time.

lbj 17y ago
jacques, I don't quite agree with your sentiment that excellence stands on it's own, but time will tell. I'd just like to correct two mistakes you made. 1) I didn't pick examples where Clojure runs circles around Python - Like I've stated before, Example #2 is a lot cleaner in Python than what I wrote. The fact that my implementation is 9.4x faster than the Python teams is not subjective and tells you something important about parallelized sequence consumption. 2) I didn't hand pick anything, I picked Lehman because it was on the front page, followed another link to something which didn't have a Python solution, another to the 'Count examples' and so on. I didn't set Python up for sniping, which I why I think the comparison is interesting. And for the record: I think Python came out looking pretty good.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  > I didn't set Python up for sniping, which I why I think the comparison is interesting. Ok, I'll take that at face value then, but from the writing I sure got a different impression. This may be my language skills though, tone of voice is a subtle thing. Quotes that are confusing to me: > which (until the next release) is a bit slow on the JVM. Is that meant as an apology for bad performance on one benchmark ? If so why apologize, in a benchmark all that matters is the facts, it's slow, or it's not. You leave out the timings on this benchmark, concentrate just on the line count, which suggests in combination with the above that clojure performed less well than python but you left out that data. Or maybe it wasn't, but it would have been consistent to show run-times for all examples, code size for all examples (and coded up in roughly the same way), preferably gzipp'd to get rid of formatting bias. > Might be a little confusing, but it's a great performance booster. << means bit-shift-left and Who is your audience here ? Any programmer worth their salt recognizes a shift operation when they see one. In your clojure examples you consistently count only the lines with code, in the python examples you count the blank lines as well. Besides, who cares about line count when one language puts a whole pile of expressions on one line and the other does not, clearly, line count is not going to be a good metric to compare the one to the other. You're also counting lines which define constants used only once and lines that print headers, the clojure program doesn't have those luxuries. So, let's rewrite the python code like you wrote the clojure code: from math import sqrt def is_prime ( p ): if p == 2: return True if p <= 1 or p % 2 == 0: return False for i in range(3, int(sqrt(p))+1, 2 ): if p % i == 0: return False return True def is_mersenne_prime ( p ): if p == 2: return True m_p = ( 1 << p ) - 1 s = 4 for i in range(3, p+1): s = (s ** 2 - 2) % m_p return s == 0 for p in range(2, 33219): if is_prime(p) and is_mersenne_prime(p): print("M%d"%p); Now, please note that I'm not a python programmer of any standing and that I've mangled the code to make it shorter but keep it functional, to compare apples with apples. If linecount was that important than I could shorten it by quite a bit further, but I don't think it is a very useful metric, especially not if you count whitespace lines in one and not in the other. Btw, this one is now 16 lines. Not as small as the clojure example, but less than half of what it was before, I'm sure a real python guru could shorten that by another couple of lines, essentially there is no real significant difference between python and clojure here. The solution where you claim an impressive speed boost is mostly due to the simply running a bunch of tasks in parallel, which when opening stuff through the network is of course a big boon. If the files would have been resident the test would have been more meaningful, otherwise you would have to compare apples with apples by running multiple crawlers feeding a single reducer. And that would have been a sample worth making, but you couldn't be bothered. Then the clojure program would probably have been much shorter than the python one. By the way, running that counting example on my computer here I get a time of 5:47, which is about twice as fast as your clojure run, wonder why that would be. It is also 24!! times as fast as the time that you report for python. I'm not quite accusing you of cooking the books but it would be nice to have you find out what went so terribly wrong when you ran that test. And so on. Really, I'm not impressed. >