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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. Re:Machine specific by i+kan+reed · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Pragmatically, almost no one actually codes software with that aspect of the target platform in mind. Unless you're writing drivers, OSes or something else that might need to know EXACTLY how many cycles an op is going to take, your cache behavior, e.g. is never going to be part of what you're building your code around.

    And RAM sizes are large enough that a "large" input is easily contained entirely within even smallish RAM.

    As long as they used a consistent testbed between languages, it's an excellent heuristic for language effects on performance in the real world.

  2. Re:Who cares about succinctness .... by sycodon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You jest, but the majority of large, mission critical systems...payroll, point of sale, etc. are in COBOL...

    When it's got to work, work all the time, handle million and millions of records, and can be maintained by college graduates, COBOL is the way to go.

    --
    When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
  3. Re:C++ = Clear Language Choice. by Warbothong · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Sincere question - I've heard that Fortran blows away (or at least beats) C++ for scientific/calculation programming... can you lend any insight into what accounts for that, specifically?

    http://stackoverflow.com/quest...