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Comparing the Size, Speed, and Dependability of Programming Languages

Posted by Soulskill on from the it's-not-the-size-of-the-float dept.

In this blog post, the author plots the results of 19 different benchmark tests across 72 programming languages to create a quantitative comparison between them. The resulting visualizations give insight into how the languages perform across a variety of tasks, and also how some some languages perform in relation to others. "If you drew the benchmark results on an XY chart you could name the four corners. The fast but verbose languages would cluster at the top left. Let's call them system languages. The elegantly concise but sluggish languages would cluster at the bottom right. Let's call them script languages. On the top right you would find the obsolete languages. That is, languages which have since been outclassed by newer languages, unless they offer some quirky attraction that is not captured by the data here. And finally, in the bottom left corner you would find probably nothing, since this is the space of the ideal language, the one which is at the same time fast and short and a joy to use."

3 of 491 comments (clear)

  1. The perfect language exists, you ignorant clod! by tomhudson · · Score: 5, Funny

    And finally, in the bottom left corner you would find probably nothing, since this is the space of the ideal language, the one which is at the same time fast and short and a joy to use."

    Plain ASCII. The shorter and faster it is, the more joy it is to use.

    What can compare to the joy and speed of, for example, the command "Go fuck yourself!"

    Even shorter and faster syntax: the command "F.U.!"

    And for conciseness of comments - "SHIT!" and "oops!" and "WTF???"

    Looping constructs: "Sit on it and rotate!"

    If-else constructs: "Dat so? F.U. 2!"

    foreach: "You, your mamma, and the horse you rode into town on!"

    Exit statements : Just fuck off!"

    c-style assertions: "Eat shit and DIE!"

    #defines: "#define YOU One dumb motherfucka"

    conditional #includes "#ifdef YO_MAMMA"

    real-time peremption: "I OWN you, beotch!"

  2. Re:Where are the real lanaguages??? by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 5, Funny

    Where Cobol and RPG, the languages that run business?

    They were so far off the top and right axes, the algorithm discarded them as outliers.

  3. Re:What kind of verbosity? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    And yet you managed to write buggy code in the most terse and readable of them. So much for dynamic languages.