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Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

thume.ca

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Re: Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

#121

Post by _hardwaregeek »

hart_russell wrote: post #48
ufmace wrote: post #9

I haven't made it through the whole thing yet, but I do want to register a vote in favor of using Lines Of Code count as a rough measure of program complexity. I think it's a perfectly valid things to do, provided that it isn't used as an evaluation metric and nobody is gaming it, and everyone is a reasonably good programmer, not doing crazy things like trying to stuff a massive algorithm onto one line to be clever,…

I'd like to hear others' opinions: There's a guy at my work who loves to use doubly, triply, quadruple-ly nested ternary operators. I always find them super hard to read. Am I just a dunce, or do I have a point in thinking it's unnecessarily terse.

Personally I'm not a fan. A lot of people love using conditional operators (?, &&, ||) in React, but having overly nested chains of these operators is a code smell for me. Probably means they can refactor the logic into separate components, or into intermediate boolean variables. Or just into a plain old if statement.

Re: Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

#122

Post by mannykannot »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #57

I think the big big result from this study is: "Python: half the size !". A dynamic language like Python is better here, 2x better. I assume similar results would apply to other dynamic languages like JavaScript, Lisp, Smalltalk, Groovy etc. This does not say that static typing should not be used but I think it shows unequivocally that there is a considerable extra development cost associated with static typing. You…

> I think the big big result from this study is: "Python: half the size!".

I would agree, if and only if I thought a representative sample of Python programmers would all produce something of a similar size and just as correct, but I suspect, in this case, it's the result of one especially talented person.

Re: Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

#123

Post by galaxyLogic »

bjourne wrote: post #92
trishume wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree it's definitely an interesting result and a point in favour of dynamic languages. A caveat is that I'm pretty sure my friend intentionally sacrificed code quality to do it, I don't think you'd find that project as readable and understandable as the others. Another caveat is that you have to be okay with your codebase being extremely magical and metaprogramming-heavy, which many industrial users of dynamic lan…

The takeaway for me was: "The next comparison was my friend who did a compiler on her own in Python and used less than half the code we did because of the power of metaprogramming and dynamic types." So it's the output of ONE Python programmer vs teams of other languages programmers?

That is a good point worth emphasizing.

It is well-known that teams cause overhead. Think of the Mythical Man-Moth.

But in the end the other teams had 3 people that were able to maintain and develop their project further, if needed. The single-person team had only one such person.

Re: Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

#124

Post by Forge36 »

hart_russell wrote: post #48
ufmace wrote: post #9

I haven't made it through the whole thing yet, but I do want to register a vote in favor of using Lines Of Code count as a rough measure of program complexity. I think it's a perfectly valid things to do, provided that it isn't used as an evaluation metric and nobody is gaming it, and everyone is a reasonably good programmer, not doing crazy things like trying to stuff a massive algorithm onto one line to be clever,…

I'd like to hear others' opinions: There's a guy at my work who loves to use doubly, triply, quadruple-ly nested ternary operators. I always find them super hard to read. Am I just a dunce, or do I have a point in thinking it's unnecessarily terse.

I love them. I also just managed to mess up a function because of one and not realize it until a late stage of testing I don't know that I've doubly nested them.

Re: Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

#125

Post by zmmmmm »

tanin wrote: post #120
ibejoeb wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what your example is illustrating. The SO question asks for the idiomatic one-liner to get the first non-null element of a list. The accepted answer does that. next(iter(your_list), None) This is 100% standard library.

Maybe I should have given the comparable example in Ruby, which is `array.first`. Even Scala offers `array.headOption`. Both are more succinct than Python's. The degree of richness and/or the height of abstraction seem lower in Python. (Not that this is a bad thing. It depends on people's taste, of course.)

Python is indeed very frustrating that way. So many of its limitations and flaws are justified on the basis of clarity and then there are this array of very simple things that can only be expressed in unclear ways which every other language offers a solution for.

Re: Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

#126

Post by tanin »

saagarjha wrote: post #100
tanin wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One factor on why Python only saves 20%. Scala has a very rich standard library. Python doesn't. An example is: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/363944/python-idiom-to-r... Ruby would have been a better example of how succinct a dynamic-typed language can be. (I made a similar comment on the parent level.)

> Scala has a very rich standard library. Python doesn't. This is not something I could have expected someone to say about Python's standard library…

I know. It's strange to say that. But Scala's library is very very rich.

Another example is that Scala offers a lot of ways to process a list like foldLeft, foldRight, unzip, headOption, lastOption, flatMap, groupBy, and many methods around Map, Set, and etc. Python probably doesn't offer many of these methods.

Of course, this comes with the cost of higher learning curve.

Re: Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

#127

Post by nhumrich »

tanin wrote: post #87

The Scala result confirms my bias :P I love Scala because it strikes a great balance between being succinct and offering type safety. I wish you would use Ruby instead of Python. Python is strangely inconsistent. For example, Python doesn't really offer a rich standard library; people have to resort to ugly solutions for a simple problem (here's an example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/363944/python-idiom-to-r…

"python doesnt offer a rich standard library"

Python is usually considered one of the richest standard libraries out there.

Yes, the is no standard way to get this one edgecase, but every language has warts and things like that. It sounds like you are just looking for an excuse to hate on Python.

Re: Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

#128

Post by shaklee3 »

trishume wrote: post #40
ncmncm wrote: post #35

I find it curious that both the team that used C++, and the author, both appear to believe that sum types and related facilities are not usable or conveniently expressible in C++. I got that Boost Spirit, a powerful parsing library, was forbidden. Were all the Boost libraries similarly embargoed?

There was a general prohibition on libraries that don't ship with the compiler, but you could ask the professor for an exception. Someone asked about Boost and a blanket exception for the non-parsing and scanning parts of Boost was granted. However the C++ team I talked to didn't use it. Also note that it's not only the sum types that are important, powerful pattern matching facilities are part of what makes them so…

C++ has had sum types for years, so I'm not sure why that was mentioned. If you aren't familiar/experienced with the language, then the comparison is not fair overall.

Re: Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

#129

Post by galaxyLogic »

tanin wrote: post #120
ibejoeb wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what your example is illustrating. The SO question asks for the idiomatic one-liner to get the first non-null element of a list. The accepted answer does that. next(iter(your_list), None) This is 100% standard library.

Maybe I should have given the comparable example in Ruby, which is `array.first`. Even Scala offers `array.headOption`. Both are more succinct than Python's. The degree of richness and/or the height of abstraction seem lower in Python. (Not that this is a bad thing. It depends on people's taste, of course.)

A comparable example from JavaScript, there is no library-method for getting the last element of an array, so it gets clumsy: myArray [myArray.length - 1]. A better standard library would provide a method for that: myArray.last(). Or maybe myArray[-1].

Re: Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

#130

Post by tanin »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #129
tanin wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I should have given the comparable example in Ruby, which is `array.first`. Even Scala offers `array.headOption`. Both are more succinct than Python's. The degree of richness and/or the height of abstraction seem lower in Python. (Not that this is a bad thing. It depends on people's taste, of course.)

A comparable example from JavaScript, there is no library-method for getting the last element of an array, so it gets clumsy: myArray [myArray.length - 1]. A better standard library would provide a method for that: myArray.last(). Or maybe myArray[-1].

That's a great example. And, yes, Javascript has a similar problem.
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