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Rosetta Code Study Weighs In On the Programming Language Debate

Posted by Soulskill on from the fresh-ammunition dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Rosetta Code is a popular resource for programming language enthusiasts to learn from each other, thanks to its vast collection of idiomatic solutions to clearly defined tasks in many different programming languages. The Rosetta Code wiki is now linking to a new study that compares programming language features based on the programs available in Rosetta Code. The study targets the languages C, C#, F#, Go, Haskell, Java, Python, and Ruby on features such as succinctness and performance. It reveals, among other things, that: "functional and scripting languages are more concise than procedural and object-oriented languages; C is hard to beat when it comes to raw speed on large inputs, but performance differences over inputs of moderate size are less pronounced; compiled strongly-typed languages, where more defects can be caught at compile time, are less prone to runtime failures than interpreted or weakly-typed languages."

3 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. Who cares about succinctness .... by Squidlips · · Score: 5, Informative

    especially if it makes the code unreadable. Give me the verbose, easy to read code any time. If you really, really want succinctness, use Perl or even better, APL and don't worry about the next poor slob who has to maintain your code.

    1. Re:Who cares about succinctness .... by beelsebob · · Score: 2, Informative

      The problem is that OOP languages rarely have more readable code. Instead, they typically have simply code with more boiler plate.

  2. "Scripting" langs are functional, OO, procedural by mr_mischief · · Score: 4, Informative

    Simply because a language is billed as a "scripting" language (by which people tend to mean distributed as source code and partially compiled for each execution rather than compiled once and distributed as object code rather than actually used primarily to script other programs) doesn't mean there's no programming paradigm associated with them. They can support procedural, functional, actor-based, object-oriented, logical, dataflow, reactive, late binding, iteration, recursion, concurrency, and whatever other paradigms and methods people want. Some of them support mixing and matching even in the same program.

    Languages that are typically fully compiled can even be run in an interpreter. C-- comes to mind. Often languages known for interpretation (actually most of which are partially compiled rather than interpreted line-by-line) have support for compiling at least portions of a program up front, too. Examples include the .pyc files of Python, luajit, Facebook's HHVM, Steelbank Common Lisp, and Reini Urban's work on perlcc.

    People making claims about one type of language vs. another should really keep straight what types they are talking about.