Author: David Rasmussen
Date: 09:10:07 01/16/03
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On January 16, 2003 at 03:29:43, Sune Fischer wrote: >On January 15, 2003 at 21:41:19, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >>Saying "vincent exaggerates all the time" is like calling a cup of sand a >>"desert". It is a gross understatement... exaggerate means to expand >>something beyond its normal boundary. Most of what he says is not based on >>any sort of factual evidence whatsoever, which makes it more fiction and >>less exaggeration. > >I know there has been many discussions, the last one I remember was about >functional languages. IIRC he said something about them being slow and gave an >example with a program he wrote that was 2000 times slower than in C. > >Everyone disagreed, but from my (granted limited) experience he is right. >It's like a hiarcy: asm, C, C++, java,... the more advanced the slower it is. What about everybody elses experiences? That's exactly the problem with Vincent. He thinks nothing of other people or their experiences. More abstract languages tend to be slower in practice, sure. That's my experience too (I would place C and C++ on the same level, speedwise, though). But that was not what Vincent said. He hinted that functional languages are 2000 times slower than C, which is nonsense, unless you're a really bad programmer. Given some C implementation of a checkers program, one can make a functional equivalent, in a given functional language. But for the functional languages I know (SML,Lisp,Scheme and others), this would not mean a 2000 time slow down. It would mean something on the order of 10 times slower. For many calculation intensive programs, 10 is even high. With Caml or other good functional language implementations, it would mean a 2-4 factor slowdown. At the most. So what is the reason of writing 2000? 2000 seems only to indicate that Vincent is a very poor programmer of functional languages. >I guess there is not much of a theoretical reason why that should be true, but >it just happens to be a fact most of the time. > >Besides that, I don't think anyone really talked about what a functional >language is, so isn't it possible that too was a source of disagreement? > What do you mean? /David
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