Re: Our Most Precious Resource: Programmer Time (was Re: long term goals)
On Mon, 4 Dec 2000, Gustavo Noronha Silva (KoV) wrote:
> Hello, I'm a new programmer and also a 'will be new developer'...
> A thing I've wondering is: perl and even shell scripts, or what ever
> like this, seem to be very much slower than any program written in
> C.
>
> I think C programs would make the debian package management
> system a lot better and faster ( I could not install packages in
> my 486 without having a headache =( )
>
> I disagree with using perl and other languages to "speed up" coding
> because I think (and I like Debian 'coz I've seen this on it)
> quality is much more important than quantity...
>
> I would like to see dpkg installing debs with all the process being
> controled by C programs (look, installing packages in my K6 II makes
> it very slow!!)
Well, how long is your 486 going to spend compiling those 'scripts'
written in C? Remember that not all of Debian is i386. The same
script is used for every archetecture. Also, another advantage of having
interpreted scripts is that you can patch them with your favourite text
editor, and even read through them to see what they do. You simply cannot
do that near as easily with a compiled language like C.
And I'm sure the long-time developers can offer better and more specific
examples than I can.
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