The Great Computer Language Shootout Revived

An anonymous reader writes "Doug Bagley's famous Great computer Language Shootout more or less died in 2001 out of lack of support by its own author. A group of developers have decided to revive it and update it with the latest versions of each compiler and interpreter available on the Debian distribution. The good news is, a wiki has been set up so that people can help improve the shootout, discuss the implemetations of the programs, and suggest optimizations."

Comments

If it's true, it's great news

[GCP]

I find it quite frustrating that there is such huge inertia in programming languages. Even when languages have some remarkable advantage, programmers won't use it because "nobody uses it."

I don't deny that popularity provides some huge advantages. I just hope that there can be mechanisms to bootstrap popularity, and this Great Language Shootout is (potentially) the sort of thing the could do that.

Some languages, for example, have significant advantages in some specialty area: Erlang in parallelism, Lisp as a language for writing specialty languages, bug minimization approaches taken by Eiffel or the functional languages, etc. They may be awful for other types of work, but the fact that a hammer is a terrible saw doesn't make it any less of a great tool for the right problem.

If there were an active, busy site frequented by developers at which there were a wide variety of benchmarks that allowed uncommon languages to show off their specialty advantages, more developers would do some of their work in those languages, and the increasing popularity would result in better implementations and a flourishing of new languages.

Right now, the popular languages don't come close to taking full advantage of what we have learned about programming, and yet you would have to be either an academic or a fool to put a lot of effort into designing a great new language. The way things are right now, a great language designer probably has a better chance of being hit by lightning than he has of ever making his great new language popular.

Anything that reduces this language inertia (and YES that includes .Net) is a Good Thing.