[MUD-Dev] TECH: programming languages (was: Re: TECH: STL / Heaps, etc.)

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

Miroslav Silovic wrote:

> Python (to take a more frequently used example) is not a
> high-level language because it's slow, and neither is it slow
> because it's a high-level language, it's slow because of its
> braindead design and implementation.

Nobody would argue that slow implies high-level.  I do argue that
high-level implies slow in the general case and that there is little
evidence to the contrary.

I also argue that the moment you start to tweak your code to fit the
engine and not the problem then you are no longer involved in
high-level programming.

> Take a look at Mercury, Haskell, ocaml, or CMU Common LISP. In
> some cases, they generate faster code than C, becuase, well,
> compilers sometimes outdo humans at thinking about cache sizes and
> branching.

Are you talking about the excellent Haskell programmers tweaking
their code to the engine outdoing braindamaged C-programmers?  Or
time-limited programming competitions where the problem is
particularly well suited for FP?

(I don't believe that cache-sizes and branching are the dominating
factors in those cases)

--
Ola  -  http://www.notam.uio.no/~olagr/

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