PHP/Python/Ruby - Immoral?

http://nerds-central.blogspot.com/2012/04/coal-stop-burning-it-just-to-make.html

by NerdsCentral • 14 years ago

5 29 14 years ago

nerds-central.blogspot.com

lukeholder2• 14 years ago

For scientific computing and data crunching, trying to get the MOST OUT OF THE HARDWARE, I would agree you are wasting resources using a interpreted language, and it is inefficient.

But when your goal is first to market, and trying to get the MOST OUT OF THE PROGRAMMERS - it is a waste of human resources, and programmer enjoyment using a compiled language with an unfriendly syntax.

Of course, you could find experienced programmers who are super fast productive, and super happy to work in the compiled languages - but don't underestimate that most people enjoy interpreted's ease of getting started, and syntax simplicity - and usually they cost less to hire as there is a larger pool of people.

cassandravoiton7• 14 years ago

But is that not the point of the post - that all the 'easy and cheep' comes at a huge cost to be planet and eventually to the company. Are C# and Java really that much harder to learn and use?

lukeholder2• 14 years ago

I believe within 20 years, we will have unlimited energy from the sun, and this will not be an issue. I don't know whether an interpreted languages is that much easier, but I do believe that any language that gets people writing code and solving interesting problems quickly can't be too bad a choice.

AlexandrB2• 14 years ago

It's trivial to write monstrously inefficient C/C++ - arguably it's even easier than writing slow Python code, because high level concepts like events and callbacks are harder to express programatically and code that should be event-driven becomes:

  while (1)
  {
    // check for input
  }

And no offense to the TFA, but all the academic code I've seen is buggy, slow, and inefficient - hardly using "every ounce of efficiency". For example, the most popular data processing tools I've seen in engineering are matlab and excel (!). Not exactly coding to bare metal.

gdg929895• 14 years ago

I have to disagree here. Although I know that the speaker is just trying to have fun with the idea the metaphor is flawed. whereas a Mercedes engine gets more and more powerful and not any more efficient computer processors are getting more efficient by the day. also the "10 to 100 times slower" comment seems like an exaggeration to me. In the end the language you use should be decided by what will give your customers the best software possible and nothing else. Because its not immoral to waste the computers time but it is immoral to waste the users time.

cassandravoiton7• 14 years ago

There are plenty of bench marks showing 10 to 100 times is in the ball part. Computers use masses of power because there are so many of them. As they get more efficient, their numbers increase. The benefit of using faster languages is constant irrespective of the efficiency of the machine on which it is running. How can wasting energy be OK? Even if you don't think it has climate change effects, it has economic and energy security effects - non of them good.

gdg929895• 14 years ago

I wouldn't say its OK to waste energy but you have to put things in perspective. Your first concern should be to save the users time. The less time they have to use the program to achieve their goal means less instructions. Videos like these aren't looking at the bigger picture.

cassandravoiton7• 14 years ago

The page below shows the media peformance of Python (the fastest in these of PHP/Ruby/Python) as 49.73 times slower than the fastest compiled language. The seems pretty much between 10 and 100 to me.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/which-programming-lan...

 	compare 2	 |-	 |---	 25%	median	 75%	 ---|	 -|

Fortran Intel 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.01 1.35 1.87 7.84 C GNU gcc 1.00 1.00 1.01 1.21 1.55 2.36 4.97 C++ GNU g++ 1.00 1.00 1.10 1.26 1.68 2.28 2.28 ATS 1.00 1.00 1.24 1.45 2.30 3.90 7.24 Ada 2005 GNAT 1.04 1.04 1.22 1.51 1.84 2.76 4.81 Java 7 -server 1.40 1.40 1.59 1.90 2.14 2.97 4.76 Scala 1.38 1.38 1.90 2.76 3.43 5.72 10.21 Haskell GHC 1.53 1.53 2.60 2.80 4.36 7.00 15.15 Go 1.29 1.29 2.12 2.85 6.90 14.08 24.05 C# Mono 1.60 1.60 2.62 3.08 7.12 13.88 14.21 Lisp SBCL 1.12 1.12 1.81 3.40 4.24 7.89 11.20 OCaml 1.18 1.18 1.76 3.75 4.87 9.24 9.24 Pascal Free Pascal 1.53 1.53 2.47 4.37 7.49 15.03 24.20 Clojure 2.02 2.02 3.50 4.99 8.44 14.81 14.81 F# Mono 2.97 2.97 3.16 5.33 8.92 17.57 37.80 Racket 1.22 1.22 5.06 6.86 11.04 19.99 59.08 Erlang HiPE 5.17 5.17 7.99 10.79 15.44 26.61 41.54 Erlang 5.40 5.40 14.20 22.73 30.09 53.91 218.10 Python 3 1.22 1.22 9.25 49.73 68.86 131.37 131.37 PHP 1.90 1.90 10.29 50.17 83.42 193.10 260.90 Ruby 1.9 4.67 4.67 11.74 53.29 101.33 235.71 356.61 Ruby JRuby 5.75 5.75 26.67 58.81 115.06 247.65 266.51 Perl 4.00 4.00 22.61 103.29 126.82 225.35 225.35

noarchy• 14 years ago

...and then they embed Flash in the page. I wonder how much energy gets wasted by my CPU fan being driven to 100% on Flash sites :)

cassandravoiton7• 14 years ago

Yes - HTML5 would be much much better - it will come soon I expect.

gdg929895• 14 years ago

Although I will concede that flash is an abomination that needs to be removed from all my computers. haha