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Re: Réf. : Officially off the rails now (was Re: what is the bestlanguage for go: Re: [computer-go]Scoreestimating)
What you say about Perl is actually not ridiculous at all. I have
programmed in at least a dozen languages, but as soon as I learned
perl, it was the language I always reached for unless I really had to
have the performance. It just made everything else look so hard.
But in my mind Perl was just the first language of a particular type
of language. I'm talking about highly flexible "scripting" language
that really are a lot more alike than different and includes perl,
python, ruby and lua and maybe others now that I haven't yet looked
into. (Pike comes to mind as another in the same genre which I intend
to take a nice hard look at.)
These languages make it almost trivial to do certain things very
quickly and easily. People will fight over the merits of these
particular choices, but when push comes to shove, they all share some
wonderful features and super ease of programming.
My personal favorite is Ruby which I think outshines these other very
similar languages. But I don't fight over this, I think they are all
great. Python and Ruby are quite close in a lot of ways and I see
them as quite a nice improvement over Perl. But they all have the
same ease of use feel.
I keep looking for the ideal language, but I don't think it will ever
exist. I am hoping to find something that is super easy like
Ruby/perl/python but has the execution speed of the advanced assembler
I use (called C.) That language does not exist. Ruby could actually
be the only language I would need if performance didn't matter (at
least for most things.)
Even though I much prefer Ruby over Python, I might be convinced to
change my mind based on some technologies that are supposed to make
Python fast. I'm thinking of "Psyco" and "Pyrex" which are things I
indend to look into. But I haven't evaluated them yet. I'm pretty
skeptical, but if the claims are true, you should be able to "easily"
produce program that execute nearly as quickly as C code. If I could
consistantly get over half the speed of C, I might be willing to take
the rest of the performance hit for being able to program in such a
wonderfully easy language.
- Don
hello,
the choice of a programming language to program game of go is far from
obvious.
When I left school (many years ago), I was convinced that the best language
was the language that you know best.
My personal professional experience has changed my mind : since 2 years, I
use perl for many of my every days tasks, it has appears to be fabulously
more effective than any other languages I know (C, C++, Ada, ksh, python,
scheme, caml, java).
I do not advocate that perl is the ideal language : it is a lot better than
any other language for my specific professional tasks (software integration,
validation, data preparation, ...).
I do not know which language is better for programming go. There are many
points to take into account :
1 Speed of execution, resources consumption
2 High level abstractions
3 Speed of programming
4 Ease of maintenance and improvements
5 Possibility to share code with other programmers
6 Readibility
I have heard of some developers using meta programming. In this case, the
meta program and the generated program may not use the same language.
The meta program has only to take into account points : 2, 3, 4 and 6.
The generated has to take into account the point 1 and may use shared code 5
This suggest to use two different languages but this is not so obvious :
perhaps the importance of the point 1 (performance) is overestimated and
there may be some advantage to have the meta program and the generated
program in the same language.
Whatever the answer is, there is no better place than this mailing list to
exchange ideas about this subject : what is the best language to program go
?
best regards
Jef
-------Message original-------
De : computer-go
Date : 09/01/04 03:14:32
A : computer-go
Sujet : Officially off the rails now (was Re: what is the bestlanguage for
go: Re: [computer-go]Scoreestimating)
Enough my-language-is-better-than-your-language? Please?
William Grosso
At 12:48 PM 8/10/2004, Peter McKenzie wrote:
>>Someone said this:
>>
>> >>I'm not sure why it wouldn't be OK for bigger programs (ie. a Go
program)
>> >>as long as you're prepared to live with dynamic typing and code up
plenty
>> >>of Unit tests.
>>
>>Whoever wrote this doesn't quite get it. Ruby and Python are better
>
>I said it and I think I get it just fine thankyou :-)
>
>>for for BIG projects and was designed for this. Much better than
>>lower level languages than Java or C++ etc.
>
>Java and C++ have been proven on countless huge projects, I don't think you
can say the same about Ruby or Python. Static typing comes into its own when
you hava a very big codebase (multi million line) with many (say 20+)
programmers working on it. In that situation it is often communication
between programmers that becomes a bottleneck, and static typing definitely
helps solve that problem in a way that dynamic typing can not.
>
>>
>>The unit tests is not more necessary in ruby/python than these other
>>languages, it's LESS needed, but it should be done. You will always
>
>I disagree. With dynamic typing the compiler catches fewer errors at
compile time, therefore you need more unit tests to catch those things.
>
>>get better results in any language by testing as you go and making
>>yourself go slow to be thorough.
>>
>>Ruby is strict about types which is the more important thing. It's
>>not STATICALLY typed but it is strictly typed. You cannot add an
>>integer and a string, for instance, like you can in perl.
>
>Ah, but you can write the source code to do it and you must rely on testing
to detect it.
>For example the following Ruby program runs just fine until you enter "b"
at which time you get a *runtime* error:
>
>a = gets.chomp
>if a == "b"
> a += 100
>end
>
>>
>>Unless python has changed, it doesn't hide data very well. Ruby is
>>way ahead unless python has fixed this, but Ruby always had it right.
>>
>>- Don
>
>cheers,
>Peter
>
>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> I think this computer language discussion is probably stretching the
>> patience of people whose main interest here is computer Go so I'll try to
>> make this my last post on the topic :-)
>>
>> >>Regarding Mark's question about large scale development: I'm not sure
how
>> >>Ruby would fare there. It has pretty decent OO features (better than
>> >>Python IMHO) which should help. My biggest Ruby program to date is only
>> >>about 500 lines and it is certainly fine for anything of that size.
>> >
>> >I really go back to read the Ruby OO features, I did not found anything
>> >that don't exist in python. Maybe you can give me good pointers on web.
>>
>> The things I didn't like about Python's OO were:
>> - lack of private and protected instance variables
>> - having to use an explicit 'self' parameter in all methods
>>
>> Note that I'm not saying Python is a bad language, just that I personally
>> didn't like it much. I'm sure that lots of people do wonderful things
with
>> Python. I'm equally sure that a sizeable bunch of people will prefer Ruby
>>
>> cheers,
>> Peter
>>
>> >
>> >>I'm not sure why it wouldn't be OK for bigger programs (ie. a Go
program)
>> >>as long as you're prepared to live with dynamic typing and code up
plenty
>> >>of Unit tests. I'd still see it as potentially much more productive
than
>> >>C++ or Java. I agree that speed would be an issue - if you do a serious
>> >>Go program in it I'm guessing you'd want to re-implement the critical
>> >>parts in C once they've stablised.
>> >
>> >I'm sure that Python can manage such programs.
>> >For that there is a similar paquages as in java,
>> >but the import system is even more powerful than java one.
>> >
>> >Personnaly I know Python only since six month
>> >and I already made a full working application (even if not finish)
>> >which has 888 lignes wich is perfectly extensible and stable.
>> >It includes: configuration, special ftp client, language source
detection
>> >C code processing, batch compilation (with system ("gcc ") calls)
>> >
>> >Biggest aplications full works.
>> >mailman (mail list manager) 33 000 lignes of code.
>> >Zope (web server and web development environemnt) 403 000 lignes of code
>> >
>> >And the point is to realize the same functionnality,
>> >the code is *really* shorter than java or C++.
>> >For exemple, in my project, with the help of introspection,
>> >I parsed a file, transform it into a full working Python object,
>> >add one simple unittest, all in one file of 79 lines.
>> >As far as I remember how I worked in java, I would expect
>> >that the same job in java would require at least three
>> >classes (one file for each) 80 lines each.
>> >That's why I rely believe that Python is three times more productive
>> >than java (even including the learning stage)
>> >
>> >So I don't think that big project in Python is an issue
>> >The integration with C is easy (but not tested personnally)
>> >
>> >So I think it meets better the requirements of go application
>> >than C or java. Maybe Lisp is even better, but I know very
>> >little about lisp, except that it is harder to learn.
>> >
>> >Xavier
>> >
>> >
>> >_______________________________________________
>> >computer-go mailing list
>> >computer-go@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> >http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
>>
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