Author: Tord Romstad
Date: 04:00:43 02/17/04
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On February 16, 2004 at 15:15:16, Anthony Cozzie wrote: >What Bob is saying (and I agree with this 100%) is that what you can do with a >low level language is by definition a superset of what you can do with a high >level language (given sufficient time/money/motivation). True in theory, but not always in practice, when you have limited time and resources. And even when the final version of the program is written in a low-level language, it is often a good idea to implement a prototype in a high-level language first. >Chess engines are usually small enough projects that it is possible to do >everything in C. Assembly is getting harder nowadays because you must have so >many different versions: good assembly for P4 is not good assembly for Athlon, >and of course an x86-64 version is completely different. > >But I think that a lot of programs (web browsers, word processors, etc) simply >don't need to be fast and _should_ be written in a high level language. Yes. And even in programs which need to be fast, the performance-critical code is usually just a small part of the whole program. Writing this small part in a low-level language should most often be good enough. Chess programs are unusual in the sense that the performance-critical parts of the code is a rather high percentage of the total program size. >Sadly it is looking like that language will be C#, rather than ML or Lisp. I am not sure precisely why you consider this sad, but if it is future job opportunities you worry about, I think there is no need to be pessimistic. There are jobs in ML, Lisp and other non-mainstream languages. Of course you will not find as many jobs as for C++, Java or C#, but there will also be fewer applicants for ML and Lisp jobs. I also think it is a fairly safe bet that the average Lisp or ML job is much more interesting than the average Java job. You can also expect a higher salary (you are hard to replace because few people know the language) and more talented and knowledgable colleagues. Tord
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