Re: OT: Why is C so popular?
Alfredo Valles <alfredo@bioinfo.cu> writes:
> On Wednesday 27 August 2003 3:59 pm, Ron Johnson wrote:
>>
>> Python!!!!!!!!!! Object oriented, and methods that need speed are
>> wrapped around C.
>
>
> And very very slow too, like any other script language.
What do you really need the speed for? If you're going to write
computationally intensive code, then yeah, you probably want C or
FORTRAN, since a lot of work has gone into the compilers for those
languages and the language is closer to what the hardware
understands. But otherwise, programmer cycles can count for a lot,
too.
Python actually in my mind has quite a few things going for it. It's
one of the only mainstream languages to have a lambda construct (lisp
isn't that mainstream, perl has sub refs but it's kind of gross). The
syntax is fairly familiar if you've ever used another language, and
doesn't have too much punctuation (lisp has parens, perl has the $@%*
variable modifiers). It also has a fairly nice standard library, and
good documentation readily available. If you're into OOP, Python
classes are fairly straightforward (though method dispatching is
always by-name, so concepts like Java interfaces are very informal in
Python). It's garbage collected, which IMHO is really important for a
language/runtime.
Downsides? It's not blazingly fast, though I haven't found it
painfully slow either. (It feels faster to me than Java, but part of
this is almost certainly the expensive startup cost of a standard
JVM.) If you're into correctness checking, it's harder to determine
the type of an object at compile time than in other languages;
pychecker is a program that will try to give warnings if a program
isn't "correct" according to standard OO methodology.
--
David Maze dmaze@debian.org http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell
Reply to: