On May 4, 3:06 am, Jon Harrop <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Lisp compilers are much more advanced, for one thing.
Though I hesitate to respond in this thread (and I didn't actually read the rest of the article) there's actually a valid point here. The last programming job I did involved doing some search stuff in Python. I think Python had been chosen for almost (but actually not) good reasons - people really wanted to use Lisp but it would have been too hard (politically and technically), and the same people had recent first-hand experience of some of the worse horrors of J2EE programming so were negative about Java. Finally Python actually had the required stuff (the ability to mmap files was critical to the proposed technique for doing the search). (The reasons were actually not good because Java could have done it as well, and if we'd had the courage we could have done a POJO-style Java thing which would have been fine and set a good example to other people, which as it was we failed dismally to do. On the other hand they'd not have hired me - despite the fact that even by then I didn't care about language choice with a few exceptions (C++), I didn't look enough like a Java person (and still don't of course).) Anyway the experience of writing in Python was kind of interesting. It had the usual single-implementation issues common to such things which meant we depended on the right version (and I think a later version than the one shipped with the OS since they'd decided to change semantics in some quite major way at some point). But apart from that writing programs that performed well (for us - we actually had performance issues since we wanted to look at a lot of data) turned out to be a matter of making sure that all the performance- critical bits were done in libraries (in C) with Python merely a kind of elaborate glue to get in the way. It was a bit like writing code for an array processor or a DSP or something, except without any good hardware reason for it. So one of the things I learned was "use a language with a decent compiler"[*] I think. --tim [*] No glib comments about Java not having a decent compiler: actually typical implementations do now (or did in 2004/5 and I bet they are better now). -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
