91–100 of 206 posts
Imagine what we could do with the amazing hardware we have, if people started to do the sane thing and actually use the hardware to do things efficiently.
I was all ready to savage his opinion after reading the headline but I agree looking at my architecture that I designed for the company I work for, CPU isn't the bottleneck. Every time I try to increase performance by multi threading as much as possible, the databases start screaming. On the other hand, the idea that dynamic languages are more productive than static languages are laughable. Statically type languages…
You sound like someone who hasn't used dynamic languages in anger, or you'd mention some of the things that dynamic languages do well that statically typed languages aren't so great at, to prevent your argument sounding like a straw man. For example: dropping into a debugger (binding.pry / pry_remote in Ruby) to write code interactively in the context of the application, transferring that code to the source, and cont…
What static languages thrive in, however, is maintaining old code that was written by somebody else.
Unless we are talking like circa 1999 I don't think I have heard a complaint yet that Python is slow. I'm curious who or where the author heard that from (not specifically the people themselves but the domain they are in). What I have heard complaints about Python are (and I don't agree with all these points): * Its not statically typed * The python 2/3 compatibility * It has some design flaws: GIL, variable assignin…
Author here. I mostly work with a lot of Java devs. They are hesitant to try python because "java is faster". Some use the static typing excuse, but oddly, the most common reason I hear people wont do python is because its "too slow". Perhaps I live in a weird bubble, but that's the motivation behind the article.
I still program and sadly prefer writing code in Java over Python even though I have tons of Python scripts in my ~/bin that I have written over the years. Mainly because I just know the ecosphere better.
And thats what most people should just admit why they choose a particular programming language. As long as its good enough... better... is just what you know more of... the cost of learning something new just to replace something new for marginal speed increase isn't worth it.
So when people say Java is slow to learn, not cool or slow to develop in because the language is verbose... I say just like you: "I Dont' Care" because learning the whole ecosphere of another language is goddamn expensive (that is languages are relatively easy to learn but all the libraries, best practices and tools is another thing entirely).
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But with a statically typed language, you don't need to go through that code -> launch -> test cycle as often because everything is type-safe.
Uh ... no. Type safety is rarely a problem from my personal experience (YMMV) in code dev. The issues I run across have to do with whether or not the code is an accurate reflection of the algorithm in question, or even if the algorithm itself is correct, if core assumptions are correct, dealing with corner cases, etc. Types rarely have anything constructive to add to this mix, regardless of whether or not I am workin…
Yeah, C++ typing system sucks. Just don't think this generalizes to other languages.
I get the point this guy is making, but if you need something parallel for a cpu bound task, throwing more hardware at the problem isn't the most efficient solution if you can just use more cores. For example adding another quad core when the first cpu is only using one core anyway is inefficient and expensive. Right tool for the right job I suppose.
Python does multiprocess very well. You can easily use all cores on your machine. Pythons main "disadvantage" is threading because of the GIL. But each process gets its own GIL. So when you multi process, your not limited to one core.
Unless we are talking like circa 1999 I don't think I have heard a complaint yet that Python is slow. I'm curious who or where the author heard that from (not specifically the people themselves but the domain they are in). What I have heard complaints about Python are (and I don't agree with all these points): * Its not statically typed * The python 2/3 compatibility * It has some design flaws: GIL, variable assignin…
I'd agree with all the complaints you list, and I love Python, but it is definitely kinda slow. I'd put the speed of python below several of the items on your list in terms of priorities I care about. I've done a lot of image processing in Python using libraries like PIL, numpy and opencv. Doing per-pixel operations is extremely easy in PIL - improving my dev time, but CPU wise the slowest of the bunch. I love protot…
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> You can say that something is a floating point number (a type) but what if that something must be between zero and one? A type can't tell you that. Of course it can. The idea behind a decent type system is to make illegal states unrepresentable. You define a type which contains a value between 0 and 1 (lets name it `probability`) and make a function `float -> probability` which checks the range. That way, everytime…
You are talking about a function (at runtime), not a type, verifying the range. And you can do that in any language, regardless of its stance on typing.
Compile-time and run-time floating point numbers constrained by precision and range. It's been a long time so I'm just going to include the examples in that document:
type Coefficient is digits 10 range -1.0 .. 1.0;
type Real is digits 8;
type Mass is digits 7 range 0.0 .. 1.0E35;
subtype Probability is Real range 0.0 .. 1.0;
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Author here. I mostly work with a lot of Java devs. They are hesitant to try python because "java is faster". Some use the static typing excuse, but oddly, the most common reason I hear people wont do python is because its "too slow". Perhaps I live in a weird bubble, but that's the motivation behind the article.
I'm a Java dev (and the one you replied to) and in the past when I didn't work at my own company the real reason Python was often not picked was because it was considered "a toy language" or "scripting language" (ie hard to maintain) and also because it didn't have vendor support like Java did. Of course this was like 8-10 years ago. I still program and sadly prefer writing code in Java over Python even though I have…
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I recently saw an analysis of frequency of bugs per language according to a breakdown of Github repositories, using issues and branches as a way to quantify bug reports. It was very interesting to see that Clojure projects were among the least buggy of all languages represented. The report looked at a variety of factors to explain "bugginess", including typing and LOC, among other things. The conclusion in Clojure's…
That idea is old enough to have entered the original edition of The Mythical Man-Month. That said, I have never seen any study like this where I didn't have some serious disagreement over methodology or conclusions. (Ok, except for that one on Peopleware.) It is a hard subject, and running a study over "the population of GitHub" is problematic by itself.