4 ms·
As my boss, who has built our nearly 20-year old company in Perl, says: "If you wanted fast, why did you choose Perl?" I think that the comment you were respond
by muraiki 11y ago
As my boss, who has built our nearly 20-year old company in Perl, says: "If you wanted fast, why did you choose Perl?" I think that the comment you were responding to implicitly meant "Perl performance vs other dynamic languages," not vs something like C. I didn't downvote you, but I assume that's probably why you've been downvoted.
- jerf 11y agoI see no evidence that Perl is particularly faster than the other dynamic languages, either. Ruby was often slower for a good long time, but seems to have caught up to rough parity. CPython generally has a slight (but in practice irrelevant) advantage over it. You know, the picture becomes to come into focus to me. I suspect due to the prevalence of the saying "Languages don't have performance, only implementations do" and people constantly slagging on benchmarks without thought, simply reflexively, and probably helped by a healthy dose of both fanboyism and instinctive revulsion to fanboyism, programmers are apparently nearly completely incapable of having a reasonable discussion about which languages are faster than other, at what tasks, under what circumstances. Well, that's a pity, because there is such a discussion to be had, and a lot of people are getting hurt because of their inability to get good information on this topic, and consequently making perfectly-avoidable bad decisions. Absolute statements are hard to come by, sure, but there are engineeringly-useful guidelines that you can discover if you examine the problem space.
- jacquesm 11y agoThere is a ton of dogma there, one of the reasons why I studiously avoid any 'which language is better' arguments if I can. The only thing you tend to learn is how the camps are laid out, without any objective data about applicability or strengths and weaknesses changing hands. I try to imagine a discussion between carpenters about chisels, saws or hammers and each having a favourite brand that they'd defend to the death in order to avoid an objective discussion about what the good and bad properties of each tool are.
- Luyt 11y agoThis is exactly why I wonder why some companies write things such as 'must be passionated about Java' in their job postings. After all, programming languages are just tools. What really matters is the applications you create with them, and that people will find your application useful and use it with pleasure.
- eropple 11y agoI tend to be worried when I see somebody describe themselves as "passionate" about a programming language. Good programmers, I have found, are passionate about programming, and all too often those who are passionate about a given tool are really much closer to zealots.
- true_religion 11y agoI don't know about carpenters, but my cousin who is a mechanic rails on and on about how this particular tool is better than the other, and only idiots would risk their lives lifting a car with that automotive lift. Where there is choice people will complain about the choices of others.
- pekk 11y agoIf someone has no preferences about tools, I doubt he has any experience at all.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]